“Frameworks of Representation”
Dr. Kyle Dugdale (Yale School of Architecture) will introduce the third colloquium in the FLPI Series, a curated collection of photographic images accompanied by an introduction drawn from Dr. Dugdale's current research project, “The City and its Gods”.
Over the past year, a series of unusually vivid images has emerged from America’s public spaces. A frieze of witnesses forms a circle at an urban intersection to honor the memory of George Floyd. Weeks later, the body of Representative John Lewis lies in state in the nation’s most famous Rotunda, witnessed by the deeply unrepresentative “Frieze of American History” circling overhead. The same space is subsequently occupied by rioters, who document their experience of the architecture with astonishing enthusiasm, followed shortly by young recruits, their military fatigues blending with the variegated sandstone of the building itself.
These are images of architecture, documenting both the loss of life and the aspiration to permanence. But they are not only images of architecture. They also embody the monumentalization of figural representation, where the word monument is understood, according to its etymology, as a reminder. And they circle around the question that shadows architecture’s commitment to figural sculpture: whether these figures can legitimately be held to represent others.
What do we see when we look at these images from within the frameworks of our own disciplines? And how are these in turn shaped by the larger structures of our conceptual, narrative, or even theological assumptions?