Christopher Reed

Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture

The notion of domesticity - the home, the family, privacy, comfort - has often been challenged and ridiculed by modernist artists, architects and designers. Today, after more than 100 years of dispute, the domestic is being re-evaluated and returned to a position of cultural prominence, looking back over the mainstream of modernism in an effort to trace it hidden domestic subcurrents. The book investigates domesticity in modern art and architecture from the Victorian period up to the present day. Through the essays, the notion of the home is freed from stereotypes of sentimental nostalgia and emerges as an arena of modern art.

Mössbauer effect study of the magnetic properties of the intermediate‐spin complex perchlorato (meso‐tetraphenylporphinato ) iron (III)

Mossbauer spectra of the polycrystalline form of the intermediate‐spin complex perchlorato (meso‐tetraphenylporphinato) iron (III) 0.5 m‐xylene have been observed at a variety of temperatures in high external fields. Analysis of the resulting spectra yields a positive electric field gradient interaction with quadrupole splitting ΔE=3.5 mm/s (4.2 K) and 2.79 mm/s (300 K). At low temperature an external magnetic field induces negligible internal field along the symmetry axis. In the transverse direction it gives rise to a temperature‐dependent negative internal field of about 23 T (4.2 K). The data have been analyzed in terms of a S=3/2 spin‐Hamiltonian and the five spin‐Hamiltonian parameters required to characterize the spectra at all temperatures and fields were D=8.0 cm−1, λ=0.15, Ax=1.273, Ay=1.119, Az=−0.164 mm/s (excited state).

Modernizing the Mikado: Japan, Japanism and the Limitations of the Avant-garde

Edwardian visual culture registered a seismic shift in perceptions of Japan. I use the term ‘visual culture’ advisedly here, for this shift hardly registers in histories of art, organized, as they are, to track the movements of the avant-garde. Despite the claims for prescience and progressivism built into the term ‘avant-garde’ and widely assumed by its practitioners and chroniclers, the case of Japan reveals that, in fact, the avant-garde often lags behind more popular forms of visual culture in registering – let alone creating – social change. My argument challenges the wishful thinking and wilful misrepresentation that characterize conventional art-historical discourse about the modern. I have argued elsewhere that, contrary to stereotypes of the free-wheeling bohemian art world, the twentieth-century avant-garde routinely invoked gender and sexuality in ways that reinscribed conventional hierarchies of normativity and deviance. Queer visual strategies developed in collectively produced forms of popular visual culture (forms conventionally classed with non-art terms: ‘pornography’, ‘activism’, ‘graffiti’, ‘camp’, etc.) were regularly raided by avant-garde artists, whose appropriations were celebrated as signs of individual achievement following the acquisitive paradigm of the military avant-garde in the era of colonialism. Other groups, such as children and the insane, the ‘folk’ and other working-class subcultures, were similarly treated as sources for modern art in ways that fetishized the hierarchy of exploiter and exploited that is central to the ‘avant-garde’ and its ‘movements’, both terms drawn from military theory. Logically enough, these dynamics of subordination and appropriation play out forcefully in relation to issues of race and empire: ‘primitivism’ is widely – if often superficially – acknowledged as central to the history of avant-garde practice. Japan occupies a pivotal place in this history, though the complexity of its position has marginalized it in overarching accounts of primitivism and of its more specific subset, Orientalism. Geographically on the far end of the ‘extreme Orient’ and chronologically the last act in the Western repertoire of ‘primitive’ elsewheres when American gunboats ‘opened’ its ports in the mid-1850s, Japan became the hinge between two versions of primitivism, corresponding roughly with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholars have charted Japonisme’s rapid evolution from the last stages of a ‘pallid Islamic exoticism’ in the service of various imperialist nationalisms to the start of a new paradigm in which the non-West was used to propose new forms of knowledge and representation in the West. Without denigrating the creative accomplishment represented by such shifts in perception and conception by and for Western intellectuals, it must be acknowledged that