A HOUSE PERFORMS
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the
Louisiana State University and
Agricultural and Mechanical College
In partial fulfillment of the
Requirements for the degree of
Doctor in Philosophy
in
The Department of Communication Studies
By
Lisa Flanagan
B.A., University of Texas, 1990
M.A., Louisiana State University, 2002
August 2008
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my advisor, Ruth Bowman, for being both a mentor and a friend over the
years. Your dedication, patience, and experience have benefitted me greatly in all areas of
performance studies. Thanks to the other members of my committee as well: Michel Bowman
and Patricia Suchy, repeat players and valued mentors and friends; Miles Richardson, whose
Poetics of Place class and awesome teaching style provided so much of the inspiration for what I
wrote and how I want to be; and Marchita Mauck, who did me a favor as a late addition dean’s
representative, and contributed her knowledge of art and design to the discussion of my research.
Big thanks to all my Communication Studies/Performance Studies mentors and
colleagues, as well as my friends both in and out of school. Y’all have made my time at LSU
enjoyable and enlightening: Andy, Antony, Ben, Brianne, Bruce, Charlotte, Chris K, Cora, Dan,
Danielle, Danny, David, Dee, Demetrius, Derek, Dre, Dr HopKins, Dr King, Dr P, DT, Elton,
Gary, Ginger, Gretchen, Hillary, Holley, Jason, Jessica, Jen A, Jenny, Joel, Joey, John, Josh, JT,
Linda, Lisa L, Lewis, Louis, Mark, Melanie, Mindy, Nick, Nirmala, Pramila, Pye, Rachel,
Randee, Rebecca, Ross, Rowdy, Sarah, Tracy, Treat, to name a few.
Thanks to family who have supported, encouraged, nudged, and harassed me as needed
throughout this process – all my love and gratitude. To my parents, Robert and Judith, you
enabled me to get here through your initial investment and continued belief in my studies. To
my siblings, Laura and Chris, for continuing to be an inspiration for me as we take our various
paths in life and add to our extended family. To Gloria, you are an important support and
addition to my family. To my husband, James, thanks for being there and taking care of me while
waiting patiently for me to finish up. (Your turn!) To Devon and Liam, you boys are one reason
I have worked so hard; I thank you for understanding my occasional absences and distractions,
for being supportive of what I had to do, and for growing into such wonderful people.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………….……….……………………. ii
ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………………………………. iv
CHAPTER
ONE PERFORMING HOUSE WORK ………………………………………………...1
TWO POP UP HOUSE ………………………………………………………………...20
THREE HOUSE OF WAX ..........................................................................................…...45
FOUR DOLL HOUSE …………………………………………………………………..75
FIVE HOUSE OF CARDS …………………………………………………………….99
SIX A FULL HOUSE……………………………………………………………….127
WORKS CITED …………………………………………………………….……..…………..142
VITA ………………………………………………………………………….………………..148
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ABSTRACT
This study analyses and performs a series of histories about a semi-abandoned Victorian
house located in downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I engage Gregory Ulmer’s inter-discursive
and inter-subjective process of historiography, the mystory, as a way of viewing and doing
research. Mystory allows for research through diverse perspectives of professional, popular and
personal discourses, which activates the pleasures and problems of knowledge production by
urging invention and creative expression. Significance is discovered in less determined, more
localized, ways of knowing that avoid fixing the house in terms of predetermined “historic”
values.
Material culture and archives like the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps discussed in Chapter
Three are viewed as active or performance processes that affect and are affected by the shifting
circumstances of history and culture. The partialities of all language forms function as
miniatures of what they represent. Texts and performances are constructed through bricolage of
the materials gathered. These metonymic expressions call attention to certain details, while
eliding or ignoring others, and are essential to the knowledge and structures produced from them.
In constructing 310 Convention on the page and stage, I understand performance in
Richard Schechner’s terms as “restored behavior,” an action or expression that draws on and
refers to its past. I call on Martin Heidegger’s notions of dwelling and building as fundamental
states of human experience through which we learn about the world around us, make meaning
from it, and understand our place(s) in it. Gaston Bachelard furthers the Heideggerian impulse
with topophilia, or the desire to protect and preserve loved spaces if only in imagination. Jacques
Derrida provides ways to structure arguments though chora, the spacing of text upon the page,
and also contributes to the archive as a site that overflows with excess through its collection,
composition, and coding. Through these and other discourses, I discover and produce ways to
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view this “insignificant” house differently by acknowledging its many histories. I also recognize
how performance on the page and stage, already embedded in loss through what cannot be
restored, reflects the possibilities and limitations of its metonymic expression.
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CHAPTER ONE
PERFORMING HOUSE WORK
The grand opulence of high ceilings, ornately carved crown mouldings, Georgian
sash windows, and operable cypress shutters offer a rare kind satisfaction. And
when the plaster of those high ceilings has a few cracks, the crown mouldings
develop a crazed finish, the sash rattles wildly in the wind, and the shutters lose
some of their louvers, we feel the inevitable effects of age and are enraptured by
the gravity of human experience that all those telltale signs evoke. . . . One
develops a rapport with and discrimination about old things: whereas the termite
infestation may need to be dealt with at any expense, perhaps the peeling paint
can be integrated into the motif
– Richard Sexton and Randolph Delehanty
New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence (3)
Figure 1. House at 310 Convention Street April 7, 2003 (photo by the author)
I saw the house over fifteen years ago now, sitting in a state of splendid decay, a strange
anomaly between a high rise and a parking lot in downtown Baton Rouge. The building seemed
to be abandoned until the owner made cosmetic changes to the exterior a few years ago, leaving
it otherwise untouched. The texture of the ashen wood and chipped paint façade, the lacy
scalloped shell of cornice molding, the floral top curls of Corinthian columns, and the rhythmic
undulation of the building as it shifts from regular right angles to trapezoidal juts of bay windows
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create patterns of attraction that draw me to it. I am compelled by its beauty. I am also
compelled by the stories the house tells of its heyday in the early twentieth century when it was
one of many homes thriving amidst the bustle of a mixed use city center. My attraction is of a
familial nature too. In my lifetime, I have lived in many older houses, but never ones with roots
beyond my immediate family. Nevertheless, I frequently speculate as to the stories they carry
within their walls and search for traces of the previous inhabitants in the nooks and crannies of
each dwelling. Having no homestead for my family‟s genealogy, I often wonder why those
connected with this particular place would seem both to shut it away and abandon it to the whims
of time.
As I watch (over) the house, I am “hooked” by its story and survival, by the way the
house makes me think, feel, and imagine, and by the archival documents, literary texts and
popular materials, anecdotes and photographs I have drawn on to help me understand the house
and my relationship to it. The house and the materials I have collected and composed over the
years lure me into a space for dwelling on the significance of a place that in conventional terms
is relatively insignificant. The house bears no connections to a famous person and, rundown as it
is and impure in architectural style, it is not a house of historic importance. Save for legal
documents, conveyance records and the like, nothing has been written about it. Further, I have
never been in the house and, since its cosmetic update in 2003 when a chain link fence was
installed around it, I find it difficult to get close to it. I tend to the house from afar. I dwell on it,
in the sense of “sparing and preserving . . . its nature” and in the sense of my “stay” as a mortal
“on this earth” (Heidegger 147). Prompted by the house, my choice to dwell is enacted in this
document, which is as much about the process of dwelling as it is about the actual dwelling
itself. Profound as that may sound, I also understand my dwelling as akin in process and
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temperament to a big fish story (or a big fish out of water story) in so far as the subject comes
into being by how the tale – a research tale in this case – is told.
THE PROJECT
My project centers around a semi-abandoned Victorian house located at 310 Convention
Street in downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I have no direct connection to the place, but my
feeling of attachment is strong just the same. To better understand my attraction, I approach the
house from a number of different perspectives, effectively writing a history or a series of
histories about the house, my research concerning it, and my performances of both here. A
prevailing perspective, then, is that of my home discipline, performance studies, although many
other perspectives enter the tale too. Additional perspectives include those of my secondary
discipline, philosophy, the poetics and politics of material culture, and historical documentation
concerning the house at 310 Convention. I also view the house through literary texts,
particularly poems; popular culture materials such as children‟s stories and song lyrics; personal
memories, anecdotes, and photographs; and live performances in which I staged the house or a
manifestation of it.
Taken together, the diverse perspectives and discourses result in a mode of creative
research that Gregory Ulmer terms a mystory, which I discuss more fully below. Briefly, a
mystory is a method of historiography that asks the researcher to engage in the inter-discursive
and inter-subjective processes by means of which texts, cultures, and histories are made. The
method activates the pleasures and problems of textual and, thereby, knowledge production,
urging an inventive process of exploration and expression. In this way, the method strives to
restore creative-artistic practices to traditional histories or, as the case may be, to our perception
and study of them, citing such practices not only in terms of discrete acts and events, but as
technologies that affect how we think and behave.
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The significance of the study lies in researching material culture, an “insignificant” house
in this case, by means of the noted method. By insisting on a research process of exploration, the
method helps me avoid fixing the house in terms of predetermined categories of “historic”
meaning and value. Rather, a less determined process of research gives rise to surprising (as
well as appropriate) discoveries regarding the histories of this particular house as engaged by this
particular researcher. Knowledge is discovered more so than given; localized more so than
determined by national or global narratives. However, as a result, the study offers a way that
material culture might be viewed and studied as an active process – a performance process – that
affects and is affected by the shifting circumstances of history and culture. In turn, the
intersection of performance with material culture (and other perspectives too) contributes to our
understanding of the possibilities and limitations of performance as a way of dwelling.
At the end of the chapter, I expand on some of the aforementioned points although, in
light of the method, the precise significance of the study is discovered over its course. A few
questions that anticipate significance and also guide my study include: how does a house
perform? How might I perform it? How do archives, specifically maps, perform? How might
they serve as models for doing research and/as performance? Indicative of the partiality of all
language forms, how might the miniature (e.g., a doll house) help me understand how we
perform place and space and thereby remember and forget? How do we dwell so as to build just
and healthy futures for ourselves? What are the possibilities and limitations of performance in
the processes of dwelling and rebuilding?
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SUBJECT
I have composed the study so that it represents my process of discovering how to
research the house and, in turn, perform the discoveries on the page. Since I hope to engage the
reader in the process, I am reluctant to reveal too much about the house at this time. Instead, I
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will share my initial research, what I knew about the house before I decided to study it in the
un/determined way that I have. My introduction is based on my observation of the material
house, conveyance, sales, and tax records that document ownership of the lot and house, and the
Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. The maps were developed and published by the Sanborn Map
Company from 1867 through 1970 and used by insurance companies to assess the risk of
insuring buildings in cities and towns across the US.
Absent from the 1903 Sanborn Map, the house suddenly appears on the 1908 map, which
suggests it was built at some point during the intervening years. It was and is a two story
structure, running two rooms wide and, it appears, three rooms deep. From the house‟s point of
view, it sports bay windows on the right front and side, and porches on the left front and side. It
was built upon wood trim on brick piers and, while damaged in places, it retains its original
weatherboard siding – i.e., long narrow boards that are slightly thick at the top. Alterations to
the house are indicated on later Sanborn Maps and are noticeable today as they don‟t quite
adhere to the Victorian style. They are, as it were, misfits. Alterations include a glass enclosed
porch covering the front and side porch areas, a one story room that runs along the left side of the
house, a one story entranceway at the back left corner, and a two story, bay shaped, screened
porch on the back right. In 2003, the house underwent exterior renovations, which included
repairs to the siding, clean up of the spindle work trim on the decorative trusses beneath the
gables and in the bay window overhangs (McAlester 264), new reflective windows, a yellow
coat of paint, and a chain link fence erected around the whole of the house. The fence has yet to
be removed. And the house bears up under its inscriptions: vacant and unsound, owned and
unloved. I want to tear it down.
The perpetrators of the fence are the current owners of the house, R. Russell McMahon
and his daughter, Claudia “Barbe” McMahon. I gain a degree of relief, however, when I recall
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that the history of the house dates back beyond the control of the McMahons. Drawing on
conveyance, sales, and tax records held in the Baton Rouge Courthouse, I track a path backwards
from 2008 to 1854, one document leading to the next and then the next, as transmitted through
computer records preceded by typescripts preceded by microfiches preceded by (photocopied)
longhand script – discovering at the “end” of it all that the 310 property was first owned by one
William Piku. Actually, the fellow‟s name was Pike, but the old records are a puzzle, difficult to
decipher due to the legalese and formal handwritten script. I discover my error while reading
River Capitol: An Illustrated History of Baton Rouge by Mark Carleton. The informative book
traces the developments and developers of Baton Rouge from its colonial beginnings through the
late 1970‟s. Mr. Pike was a wealthy banker, merchant, and entrepreneur, serving as president of
the New Orleans and Baton Rouge Railroad (Carleton 72). From 1861to1900, he owned the one
and only theater in Baton Rouge, which was variously called Pike‟s Hall, Pike‟s Opera House, or
the Third Street Theater (Carleton 99). Although Mr. Pike did not build the house at 310
Convention, his position and wealth suggest the property was lucrative.
On May 15, 1902, the heirs of William Pike sold the lot to Dr. John Russell Fridge for
$1225 and, some time between 1903 and 1908, Dr. Fridge built the house that now stands there,
placing a sign over the front door that read and still reads, “J. R. Fridge, M. D.” According to the
conveyance records, the house was passed from Dr. Fridge to Mrs. Fridge, to their daughter and
son-in-law, Pearl F. and Dr. Rhett G. McMahon, who passed it to their son, R. Russell
McMahon, who now shares joint ownership with his daughter, Claudia “Barbe” McMahon. An
old family with deep roots in the city, the McMahons own and manage a number of properties in
downtown Baton Rouge. As I detail in Chapter Two, Barbe is a particularly “interesting”
woman who has hooked more than one person into pointed debates regarding who has the
authority to preserve old buildings and not. For a while, she hooked me too.
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In 2002, the property at 310 Convention was assessed. It measured 64‟ on the south side
of Convention by 160‟ deep, less 12‟ by 32‟ at the southeast corner of the lot. The land was
valued at $7,150 and improvements to the house at $1000 for a grand total of $8,150 on June 3
2002, when the McMahons incorporated the house as a limited liability company, calling it “Big
House 310.”
METHOD
The mystory method was developed or, more accurately, articulated as a research process
by the mass media scholar and cultural critic, Gregory Ulmer. As a research episteme and praxis
– a way of viewing and doing research – the method is not new and current examples of it are
multiple and diverse, ranging across disciplines in academic scholarship and popular culture
expressions.1
Compelled by these examples of what he calls creative research, Ulmer proceeded
to identify and systematize the recurring elements he found in the examples into a method,
terming the result “textshop pedagogy” or “mystoriography” or, simply, the mystory.
As I noted previously, a mystory is a mode of creative research that engages the
researcher in the problems and pleasures of producing text and, thereby, knowledge too – or, as
Foucault following Nietzsche might have it, the politics of laying claim to knowledge. In an
attempt to recognize and activate rather than evade the politics of textuality, or inter-textuality to
be precise, the mystory researcher aims to compose a document that is clearly a multi-sourced,
multi-perspective and, for Ulmer, a multi-media production, such as a video or on-line event. As
Michael Bowman and Ruth Laurion Bowman demonstrate in their translation of the mystory to
live performance, a mystory on the page and stage are multi-media/mediated events too.
1
See, for example, Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse; Michael Bowman, “Killing Dillinger;” Bowman and Bowman,
“On the Bias;” Morris; Sebald; and Suchy.
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My understanding and discussion of the mystory principles and practices is indebted to
Bowman and Bowman‟s essay “Performing the „Mystory‟: A Text Shop in Autoperformance” in
which they define the key terms and concepts of the mystory and discuss their implementation of
the method in the performance studies classroom. As a neologism, mystory alludes to its
multiple texture. It is a term that intermingles history (or herstory), mystery, and one‟s own
story. In the method, history is understood “as both a story of the past and a professional
discourse that enables and constrains how the past is represented” (164). Mystery refers to the
popular culture genre of detective fiction, which serves as an analogy for scholarly research: with
spyglass in hand, the researcher tracks diverse, sometimes inconsequential clues in an effort to
solve a problem or draw in/significant conclusions. The integration of one‟s own story is
understood as the inevitable result of selecting and writing about a given subject. As with the
reflexive tendencies in modern art (literary and otherwise) and the inter-subjective imperative in
contemporary art, the mystory encourages the researcher to acknowledge how her story and
discourses are enciphered in and through the given subject and the materials she brings to bear
on it and, vice versa, how the subject and materials are enciphered through one‟s self (or storied
self) and rhetoric. Ideally, the researcher finds creative, inventive ways to do this; to articulate
the inter-subjective relationship without privileging her own subjectivity.
The components of history, mystery, and autobiography direct attention to the practical
ingredients of a mystory research project. Typically, the researcher draws on and writes in terms
of three general domains of discourse: professional, popular, and personal. Professional
discourse articulates any branch of formal knowledge or expertise the researcher may hold or
draw on in her research. For instance, in this study, I call upon performance studies, philosophy,
and the poetics and politics of material culture. Popular discourse includes both pop cultural
forms, such as those found in music, television, magazines, novels, fashion, and film, and more
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traditional resources, such as community stories, oral histories, family lore, jokes, and gossip.
Personal discourse refers to one‟s individual memories, thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
By including diverse perspectives and discourses, broader political aims are realized.
Namely, the inclusion insists that the history or representation of the subject is constituted not
only by professional discourses (as some scholarly texts might lead us to believe), but by diverse
people talking about and enacting the subject in diverse often divergent ways. As Foucault on
genealogy tells us, “if the [researcher] listens to history,” she finds that it is a “profusion of
entangled events . . . fabricated in a piecemeal fashion” in response to random conflicts by
individuals and groups of disparate inclinations (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” 142, 152,
155). Like the genealogist, there is no doubt that the mystorian structures (makes some
analytical sense and order of) the tangled web she finds, however, not to the extent that the
differences within the web disappear. Indeed, aspects of the mystory process can prove to
entangle the researcher, more so than not, in the profusion of people, events, stories, and
discourses she discovers.
A key tool of entanglement and analysis entails writing in the mode, genre, or style of the
specific discourses the researcher finds or chooses to use. Following Roland Barthes‟s lead that
“every text contains a set of instructions for making another text” (S/Z 4), the researcher may
adapt or even transform research materials in terms of other texts or text types and their language
conventions. Needless to say, this tactic is no different from writing in the style of professional
academic discourse, which of course we do all the time. Although the researcher is expected to
integrate professional discourses into her work (informed as she is by them), other models of
writing and thinking are available too. She can compose in the genre and style of the personal
anecdote, family gossip, a pop up book, maps, poetry and song lyrics, the fairytale, or detective
thriller, as I do in this study. Similarly, the researcher is encouraged to rewrite rather than
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reproduce her personal responses to the subject – e.g., those associative memories, experiences,
and stories that may arise. Although any auto-discourse rewrites the life it may seem to
represent, the use of quite conspicuous models foreground the constructed aspects of the self
and/in writing as compared to the concealment of one‟s rhetoric in the adoption of a neutral or
objective stance or, in some cases, that of the true hence credible self. The self then is not an
assumed entity in this method; rather, it is a part of the mystery to be investigated. In this way,
the mystory adopts what might be considered a more impersonal, inter-textual approach to self
and self-expression in scholarship.
(Re)writing in terms of models encourages researchers to produce as well as report
knowledge. In pedagogical terms, the researcher learns not only how to describe and analyze the
inventions of others, but to invent something herself. And, throughout the process, the lesson is
that analysis, imagination, and imitation are all integral parts of invention. Through an
integration and juxtaposition of multiple forms of discourse and a more writerly approach in
using these forms to generate new texts, the method allows for a heuretic as well as a
hermeneutic approach to research. That is, the method is designed to generate sudden flashes of
insight or illumination – “eureka experiences” or moments as Ulmer calls them (Heuretics 142) –
more so than produce interpretations of source texts that one defends in light of some
predetermined aim. To facilitate this approach, the researcher is encouraged to take a pedestrian
or touristic view and attitude towards the research, moving around in and experiencing the
subject as an inexpert, at ground level if you will rather than from an overhead view. The idea
here, of course, is to retain an inclusive attitude toward the diverse materials and perspectives
one discovers rather than accept or reject them in light of a predetermined aim. As I describe in
Chapter Two, one of the many eureka moments I experienced in my research concerns the
prickly figure of Barbe McMahon. While Barbe assumes the front stage role in her partnership
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with her father, her interactions with the public are rare but startling. Ultimately, my attempts to
gain access to the house are tied up in the mystery of “herstory,” sparking my curiosity, jealousy,
and ire.
In their essay, Bowman and Bowman discuss how they translated Ulmer‟s mystory to the
performance classroom. Points they make that are particularly pertinent to my application of a
performance perspective in this study include starting a process from an undetermined point of
not knowing so as to discover and make knowledge through practical experimentation. This
approach describes how a house I spied on for so many years kept popping up as a topic for
research in diverse courses and projects in performance studies, anthropology, cultural
geography, and architecture. A second pertinent feature is the importance of imitation to
invention, which becomes integral in my use of bricolage to construct texts about the house from
the research materials I have gathered. Bowman and Bowman expand further on the above
concepts by calling on Barthes‟s notion that “every text contains a set of „instructions‟ for
making another text” (S/Z 4). In each of the following chapters, I call on a material and
linguistic trope (e.g., a house of wax) to inform how I view and compose the materials in the
chapter, always working within the possibilities and limitations that the figure offers in
constructing the text.
For this study, I understand performance in Richard Schechner‟s terms as “restored
behavior” (36). Culture and context specific, restored behavior is an action or expression that
draws on and refers to its past. In some way, the action or expression infers it has been done
before, although with slight to extreme differences. In these terms, we can say 310 Convention
performs since the architect drew on the conventions of Victorian style (as applied in “kit
houses” made available through rail commerce) in his design and building of the house, restoring
and displaying them to the public eye. The public, in turn, appreciates and evaluates the house in
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terms of its draw on and inventive play with the conventions. Over the years, the performance of
additional styles (e.g., the glassed in porch) depreciates the “historic” value of the house for
some audiences, such as architectural preservationists, since the value is based on notions of
preserving “authentic” and “origin-al” styles. We might say the house performs an impure style
and, hence, risks its survival. Rather than accept “historic” at face value, we might redirect our
energies and ask what an assemblage of Victoriana memories and counter memories tell us about
performing house-history-culture in Baton Rouge over the span of fifty or so years. Thereby, we
make meaning of the values rather than accept them outright.
Another key “professional” perspective I bring to and drawn on in my research of the
house is philosophy, specifically phenomenology and Jacques Derrida‟s post-structural theories
of language and language operations. These philosophies offer theoretical foundations for the
various threads of discussion on the significance and implications of my research concerning
310. Additionally, each philosopher provides key metaphors and methodologies for doing
research and translating it into text.
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher who approached notions of being through
many lenses, including existentialism and phenomenology. He introduced the paired notions of
building and dwelling, which translate as preserving, sparing, or staying with things, be they
structures we erect, relations we form, or the earth we inhabit. Dwelling and building are
fundamental states of human experience through which we can learn about the world around us,
make meaning from it, and understand our place(s) in it. In all phases of my research, I learn to
build and dwell on the materials and associations that arise in the process of constructing my
text, as well as the models and installations that accompany its production. Preserving also is
important to my research in terms of Heidegger‟s emphasis on the necessity of community or cocreated
values in the process of preservation.
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Gaston Bachelard was a French contemporary of Heidegger who furthered Heidegger‟s
phenomenological view on the poetics of experiential sense making by providing conceptual
models for the human experience of space. Bachelard calls for an understanding of architecture
and space generally through one‟s experiences and dreams of a certain place or space. Poetic
forms and imagery are his chosen mode of expressing such experiences. In particular, Bachelard
provides my research with the notion of topophilia, or the desire to protect and preserve spaces
we love if only in our imaginations. Bachelard extends this loving affinity to the miniature as
demonstrated by the miniaturist‟s careful attention to crafting descriptive details. Over the
course of my research, I explored the miniature in a fairly explicit way by building a threedimensional
model of 310, which I discuss in the study.
Jacques Derrida‟s philosophy provides ways to structure the language of my arguments
on the page and for understanding those structures as a play of meanings, or differance, which is
implicit in signification. Derrida offers the chain of difference that occurs in naming where
“metaphor shapes and undermines the proper name” (Of Grammatology 89), which correlates to
my inability to access the house in literal terms and stabilize its meanings here. The play of
meanings has generative potential in Derrida‟s notion of chora. Chora both recognizes and
delights in the spacing of text upon the page, a spacing that is inherent to the structure of text and
analogous to the process of deferral in language itself. Derrida also offers the concept of the
archive as a site that overflows with excess despite and because of what the archivist includes
and leaves out in her collection, composition, and coding of the archive. In Chapter Three, I
apply this idea in my interpretation and performance of the Sanborn Maps, exploring the maps in
terms of their structures of economy and excess.
The language and practices of material culture offer one way for me to get inside the
structures of 310 Convention, if not inside the actual house. By studying the vernacular features
14
of the architecture, I can access not only the material aspects of the house‟s design, but also the
broader historical and cultural implications or imprints embedded in the material choices. The
archives I use in my research, particularly the Sanborn Maps, provide information on the
material culture they document, the values implicit to producing the maps over time, and how the
maps function as metonym. Such aspects influence how I think and write about 310 here. My
research of the material culture of the house also requires me to recognize and claim my position
in the genealogical histories or mystory I construct. Implications as to what I study and why
emerge to the fore in Chapter Five when I discuss 310 Convention in light of the enormous loss
of material, familial, and cultural home-places in the wake of the hurricanes that hit the Gulf
coast in 2005.
In the following section, I anticipate my application of the mystory method and the
diverse perspectives I discussed or inferred above by offering brief summaries of each chapter.
Following Barthes‟s suggestion that every text contains a model for making a new text, I
conceived each chapter in terms of a house trope that I discovered over the course of my research
and that seemed appropriate to the material and issues in each chapter.
CHAPTER SUMMARIES
In Chapter Two: Pop Up House, I launch my investigation of how I might research 310
and, like a pop up book, my discoveries are often surprising. The resources and tools I discover
activate the house as a constantly shifting subject of research, a transformative site that allows
the house to stand up and out for me. I draw on Martin Heidegger‟s notions of dwelling and
building to preserve my experiences of the house through acts of the imagination, construction,
and transformation. Nietzsche and Derrida provide the metaphor of the chain as a way to
understand how individual moments or words are like links that are only as strong as their
interconnections, which then results in the construction of language and history. Derrida also is
15
a key figure in my understanding of chora, a model for how language works on the page to
merge being and becoming through transformation.
In Chapter Three: House of Wax, I draw on the metaphor of the archive as a hive that
contains wax comb structures that support and give rise to the honeyed knowledge contained
within. I use the figure to guide my collection and composition of the hard bound and digital
archives of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, concentrating on how the maps document 310 and
its surrounding neighborhood over time. I learn that the maps perform in terms of a structure of
economy, as indicated by their metonymic use of language, and an alternative or anti-structure of
excess, as indicated by the gaps and contradictions that arise. The maps provide a structure for
composing a three-dimensional model of the house that performs the metonymic function of the
archive in and as miniature.
In Chapter Four: Doll House, I recall and emphasize the idea of the miniature, reconceiving
its perceived limitations as potential strengths for generative meaning making. The
concepts and practices of miniaturization are used to view the three-dimensional model of the
house as staged alongside three other pieces in a performance installation concerned with “places
that evoke a sense of the past.” Installation functions as an act of preservation in Heidegger‟s
terms by encouraging others to stand within the space of the research and become a part of its cocreation.
Derrida‟s notion of play is important in addressing the “disruption of presence”
(Writing and Difference 292), or what cannot be made present in the spaces of the page or stage,
as miniature. To conclude, I connect my discussion of the miniature to Bachelard‟s notion of
topophilia or a love of space.
In Chapter Five: House of Cards, I introduce the metaphor of a house of cards, observing
that balance and friction, patience and time are key factors in building a house of cards that is
relatively stable. I follow Heidegger‟s lead and wager, or risk, my research project to broader
16
issues of rebuilding homes and communities in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricanes that ravaged
the Gulf coast. I begin by discussing a film about loss and hope composed shortly after the
storms by two students from the New Orleans area. The students‟ project forced me to review
310 in light of priorities and issues of rebuilding and preservation. I proceed to discuss a
fundraiser for displaced artists in which I and 310 Convention played a part, reflecting on the
diverse experiences and expressions of the participants as they (also) contributed to an event of
communitas. The creative potential of the metonym emerges to the fore in my discussion of how
310 operates in terms of the issues that concern me in this chapter and, in conclusion, I discover
that an “art of losing” may help us rebuild our homes and communities in just and healthy ways.
In Chapter Six: A Full House, I highlight the theoretical and practical implications of the
study for performance research and expression. The pop up house of possibilities allows for a
multiplicity of positions and choices in doing and expressing research. The processes of
transformation and bricolage demonstrate the embedded flexibility of structures and suggest how
we might take advantage of the same. Transformation also is evident in chora or the imaginative
building and spacing of language on the page and in performance. The house of wax provides a
metaphor for the archive in action, as a structure always in movement in relation to the histories
the archivist-researcher collects and composes, and in which she dwells. The resulting
accumulation of materials may result in performances that sustain structures of appropriation, or
performances that generate knowledge and that recognize that which enables them. The doll
house delineates the way language, material artifacts such as 310, and performance are
miniatures that magnify certain values and, potentially, encourage critical reflection on rather
than blind acceptance of given values. One way the miniature realizes its potential is by
highlighting the differences between the actual, imaginary, and fictive real spaces in expression
and performance. Finally, a house of cards directs attention to the instability of texts, archives,
17
research, and performance due to the changing circumstances of time, place, and bodies. Things
are remembered and forgotten. While creative and exciting, imagining possibilities for what is
lost does not translate easily to material reality and action. What is lost cannot be made present
and, therein, rests the art of losing.
SIGNIFICANCE
By investigating the house at 310 Convention, I attempt to understand its material,
cultural, and historical significance, as well as the importance it might hold for those with
personal connections to and memories of a house. Admittedly, I would like to know why I am
fascinated with 310 in particular. I like the features of its architectural details, those that
remember its initial form and the alterations to that form over time. For the past twenty years or
so, the house has sat vacant: a monument to its former days, a relic of a time when family homes
were prominent in the downtown area, an oddity now amidst high rises and parking lots, a
weathered keepsake (or tax write off) for the family who owns it. The added dimension of a
familial history fuels my interest. The house, then, shows the processes of history, of telling
stories and being told by stories in the continuously shifting space of people, their time and
circumstances. By attending to these processes, I learn how the house performs and, in turn, how
I might perform it here in ways that articulate, contribute to, and extend its many stories.
Studying the material culture of a people in time and place enables the comprehension
and expression of the stories embedded in the artifacts and archives of, in this case, a house.
Such study excites and entails a visceral experience of dwelling in the culture(s) and learning
how it expresses itself. Additionally, the multiple texts of investigation, such as court records,
maps, local histories, regional and national architectures, material constructions, photographs,
paintings, and oral histories help unravel and further complicate the mystery and history of the
house while they also contribute to the building of a place for it in the space of the document.
18
By concentrating on such a specific topic as one house in time, the many ways we might
investigate and express material culture surface and, thereby, the processes of culture making are
stressed.
The development of this project is important to performance as an example of the merits
of an interdisciplinary approach to performance research. The perspectives I draw on emphasize
the role of place and space in performance and the interplay of these concepts in the study and
documentation of a subject. The making of a mystory in this case has philosophical implications
for performance in emphasizing the process and partiality of the researcher in the chain of
language and history. Generally, I address questions of how the house performs and I perform it;
the performance of space and place, remembering and forgetting, dwelling and (re)building in
diverse sites of expression; how different language forms provide models for performing one‟s
experience and understanding of material culture; and how performance can indicate absence
without forcing it to be present.
How this project comes together into something that moves beyond, but still recognizes
the importance of my personal relationship to 310 is the subject of how knowledge is not only
collected and interpreted, but discovered and composed. By intermingling hermeneutic and
heuretic approaches, I demonstrate their compatibility and I hope the complexity of experience,
understanding, and expression that can result. In doing so, I fulfill my desire to experience the
house in a direct manner, interacting with the actual site, expressing my feelings as well as my
thoughts, and allowing my imagination to dwell in (and sometimes fill) the gaps in the stories I
collect and discover, interpret and compose. Although my specific aims vary, generally my goal
is to find ways to view this insignificant house differently.
19
In his essay, “Worlds of Meaning: Cultural Geography and the Imagination,” Denis
Cosgrove synthesizes how the imagination engenders diverse expressions through the process of
transforming experience through other forms:
Imagination is what gives the world meaning. Imagination is neither purely of the senses,
which align us to nature, nor purely of the intellect, which separates us from nature. The
work of the imagination is neither purely reproductive (that is, determined by sense data
from the external world on which it depends) nor purely productive (that is, an imagemaking
negation of that external world). Rather, imagination plays a symbolizing role,
seizing on sense data without reproducing them as mimetic images and
“metamorphosing” them through its metaphorical capacity to generate new meaning.
(388; emphases in original)
The transformation of 310 Convention into research and as performance allows me to engage the
imaginative possibilities of the chorographical development of the text. My goal is to take the
“present” being-ness of 310 Convention from the data and stories I collect and, from this
collection, invoke a sense of the larger spaces the place evokes. By interweaving and
juxtaposing the materials of the mystory, I strive to create a homestead of history and hope.
From the individual and communal experiences and understandings of the house perhaps a space
can be made for its future.
20
CHAPTER TWO
POP UP HOUSE
I have had dreams about houses for as long as I can remember. I have visited the same
places multiple times throughout my life, each time exploring and learning a little more about the
homes of my mind. One place I have visited since I was young is an old mansion on a cliff. At
first, I felt awkward, scared, and out of place in the big sprawling house. I felt like I was in
danger or invading someone else‟s space. Over time, I became more comfortable visiting the
house and traversed its stairs, secret doorways, and passages looking for new things to explore. I
remember spending time in the basement, among bricks and beams and low ceilings. There was
a special staircase that led to the attic, one of my favorite places to visit because of the boxes and
trunks of mementos to be explored there. Whoever lived in the house, she (I imagined an old
woman who I always just managed to miss) didn‟t seem to mind me and often my family looking
through the old photographs, vintage clothes and jewelry, toys and other knickknacks stored for
our exploration. Sometimes my siblings and I would spend the night in a small room in the attic.
I remember watching the ocean storms from the high windows, seeing the crash of the waves
against the cliffs and yet knowing I was safe.
Another place I began to visit after my undergraduate years at Louisiana State University
(LSU) was a house not far from campus that never existed, except in my dreams. It was a large,
white columned estate set back from the road behind the Circle K. Inside, there were many
apartments often connected by double doors. The rooms in the apartments were decorated in
dark wood furnishings, rich brocades, heavy velvets, and crystal chandeliers overhead, a strange
Rococo environment for poor college students. I always had a hard time figuring out which
room was mine and which were my roommates‟. I was happiest in the rooms on the ground
floor in the back of house, which included a screened porch of wicker furniture, plants, lots of
21
sunlight, and a great view of a sprawling green yard that did not appear to exist when
approaching the house from the front. I do not have much dream-memory of actually living in
the house, but I have navigated my way through the rooms many times.
When I was young, my Mom had a recurring dream about a house and, from that time on,
my family would take weekend drives in search of her “dream” house. The dreams started when
we were living in Des Moines, Iowa, in a house we all loved, but were having to leave so that my
Dad could pursue a master‟s degree at Colorado University in Boulder. After the move, we
would drive to neighboring cities and towns looking for the illusive house, asking my Mom to
describe the size, color, and other distinctive details as we “cruised” the nicer neighborhoods. I
suspect the activity was partially a diversion from the cramped student housing in which we
lived and a means of free family entertainment for a college family of five. Nevertheless, we
continued to look for the house on our subsequent moves to upstate New York and
Massachusetts, as my Dad worked his way up in the corporate world and my Mom began to
pursue her own education and career. These days, I sometimes imagine my parents taking a
weekend drive from their home in Charleston, South Carolina, in the hopes of finding the illusive
abode. It is not that their current home is not wonderful or that some of our other homes were
not nice, but there is something exciting about the possibility of having the house of your dreams
become a part of your reality. My Mom has never wanted to build the house; somehow, she
feels it is just “out there” waiting for her and for us to find it.
MomWhat
were the details of the house you dreamed about that we used to drive around and
look for in the various places we lived? I cannot quite remember the entire details about
it, just that we would go on missions to try to find it. Was it Victorian? What color was
it? I'm putting together some house-stories. . . .
Love, Lisa
22
Lisa,
It was more the setting rather than the building itself that was so vivid in my dreams. It
was on a street that wound down a hill and it also sat up from the sidewalk with a stone
retaining wall. The house foundation was stone also and the style was sort of Queen
Anne Victorian (not a style I would have consciously sought after) and had a deep and
wide front porch. I never dreamt the interior.
I had the dream repeatedly during the last year we lived in Des Moines (flat). So, when
we moved to Colorado we began to think we would find it there where there were hills
and made a point of looking for it. Dad thought he'd found it once in a town near
Gloucester when he preceded us to Mass. and was looking around for a place for us to
live (before he found Newburyport).
I still occasionally dream that I am back in our house in Des Moines. I know it belongs
to someone else but it seems empty so I go on in. Once inside I am anxious I'll be found
trespassing but I somehow feel its really still mine and I never want to leave. Sometimes
when I go upstairs it is just as it was when you and Laura shared the space – still painted
pink. And I always linger in the dining room. (Swartzel)
The dream house gives way to memories of the house of her dreams, a place that
was passed on to us lovingly by the original owners heading into retirement after raising their
own family there: A 1940‟s mid-western bungalow with shade trees and ample acreage tucked
into mid-sized mid-city living. This is where I spent my formative years, my elementary school
years with the paste and paper of home work in the upstairs room my sister and I shared and
divided in turf and ego battles, she claiming the stairs and I the walk-in closet. It was a nice
place to live despite the heartland cold and heat. The window seat view from my bedroom made
me feel like I was peering through the eyes of the “little house” in Virginia Lee Burton‟s story by
the same name: window eyes watching the change of the seasons around her year after year
and, through it all, remaining intact, resolute, and hopeful. In the places and spaces of the literal
and literary houses of my childhood, I feel most at home. Like The Little House, changes in and
over time have not diminished the power such places hold.
23
Figure 2. Burton, The Little House (cover illustration)
In this chapter, I discuss my introduction to 310 Convention and my initial experience of
discovering ways to research the house, which I (now) understand and choose to articulate in
terms of the metaphor of a popup book and house. The methods and models I discovered often
“popped” to mind and also allowed the house to stand up and stand out as a subject for me.
They include first person observation and photographic documentation, archival research of local
documents and records, theoretical and practical investigations in classes on vernacular
architecture and the poetics of place, genealogical processes, and heuretic play in live
performance and writing. Martin Heidegger‟s notions of building and dwelling as a way to
experience and make sense of the world became an important model for me as did the notion of
chora, which in this chapter I trace from Plato to Jacques Derrida to Gregory Ulmer. Chora is
the space between thought and concept, the space and spacing of the word upon the page, and a
24
generative process of discovery. Chora is also Kora, the Greek goddess of springtime and, for
William Carlos Williams, a metaphor for the creative force and power of the imagination. This
chapter is about the process of finding forms that help me theorize and express my research of a
particular house in ways that allow the house, my research, and the reader space for discovery on
and through the page. The aim is to show that building and dwelling in the imagination as well
as in other forms of research offer theoretical possibilities for transformation much like the
popup books of childhood create images that jump out and then transform into other images,
spurring the reader to engage a like process.
LITTLE BIG HOUSE 310
And the house of memories becomes psychologically complex. . . .The house we were
born in is an inhabited house. In it the values of intimacy are scattered, they are not
easily stabilized, they are subjected to dialectics. (Bachelard 14)
Fast forward to the early 1990‟s, living in Baton Rouge, starting a family in the relative
sleepy safety of little city living. I see the house at 310 Convention Street and am drawn to its
abandoned grace. It stands in a state of splendid decay, a strange anomaly amid the mix of
churches, parking lots, empty store fronts, and mini high rises in the downtown business district.
It seemed to me the house was abandoned until the owner made cosmetic changes to the exterior
in 2003, leaving it otherwise untouched: a painted lady with an air of quiet dignity that bespeaks
its architectural craftsmanship and resilient pride. The structure, one of the last remaining
residences in the downtown district, evokes grand narratives of a heyday long gone. In
particular, I wonder about the stories that fill the spaces beyond the façade of this little house.
Who owns it? Why don‟t they live there? Why do they leave the house vulnerable to the whims
of time and environment? Why bother with exterior updates if the house is to remain empty?
What drives such partial preservation?
25
A few years before the renovations, I tried to inquire about the house and the family who
owned it. My inquiry was sparked when I was scanning property descriptions in the newspaper
and by chance landed on a description that sounded very like 310 Convention. When I called the
listed number, the female voice on the other end of the line told me the house was in such
disrepair that it would never be suitable for residential use and only a corporate buyer would be
interested in purchasing it. She said it was “unsafe,” making me wonder what kind of business
would want to relocate there if it was so unsound. Maybe the implied point was that they could
afford to tear it down and rebuild. I gulped and tried to get her to tell me the price, but she was
unwilling to impart the information. I do not believe the number I called was that of a realtor‟s.
I do believe it was my first contact with “Barbe.” Claudia Barbe McMahon, the elusive owner
who holds the keys to the house I inhabit.
Three-ten Convention evokes a sort of literary nobility in its lovely architectural details
that despite the grime or new paint persists. The house reminds me of the old homes of my
upbringing, grand in their historicity and design. Although the homes were not mine in the sense
of lineage, I have strong memories and associations regarding them. In Edward Casey‟s terms, I
inhabit them.
When I inhabit a place – whether by moving through it or staying in it – I have it in
my actual purview. I also hold it by virtue of being in its ambience: first in my body
as it holds on to the place by various sensory and kinesthetic means, then in my
memory as I hold it in my mind, moreover, that includes such nonmentalistic things
as language, body memory, and habitudes themselves. (Casey 412; emphases in
original)
Habitation connects the concepts of place and self together through the sensory experiences one
carries after interacting with a place. Although I have never entered the house at 310
Convention, my experiences in other similar places allow me to “have” this house due to my
sense-memory “hold” on the other homes. Additionally, I am curious about those who also
26
“have” and likely “hold” this place, particularly Claudia Barbe McMahon. Three-ten
Convention is her family‟s homestead, left unoccupied and empty for so long, but not completely
forgotten or ignored.
The McMahons seem to inhabit 310 Convention through ownership alone. No one has
lived there for many years and I speculate it has been unoccupied since the death of Barbe‟s
mother, Yvonne (Barbe) McMahon, in 1991. I first noticed the house was empty in early 1993.
Barbe, a brother, and her father list other addresses in town, and a sister lives out of state. I also
know that the Downtown Development District has tried for years to get the family to sell the
place for commercial purposes or residential use, something other than just sitting there. When
the exterior renovations were being done, a foreman on the job told me that he felt the work was
too little too late. He also said that no renovations were planned for the interior, which was in
bad shape too.
A newspaper article about
the work inspired more
questions: why do the work
if there are no plans to sell,
rent or live in the dwelling?
Why a purely cosmetic job?
Was there pressure on the
family concerning the
“look” of the place? Is the
Figure 3. “Getting a Facelift” (JohnWilliams) owner‟s name Barb or
Barbe? If Barbe, is the “e” voiced, as in Barbie?
27
According to a series of articles in The [Baton Rouge] Advocate in the fall of 1997, a
parallel house story to my own involves Barbe and her father staging a successful fight to stop a
Metro Council moratorium on the demolition of several properties they owned in the historic
downtown neighborhood of Beauregard Town. The battle between the McMahons and
community members became a war of wills and personalities. In an article dated October 28,
1997, the McMahons‟ lawyer, Art Smith, claimed that "[t]he houses are contaminated with lead
paint and asbestos. They're in very, very poor shape. I don't see the historic value of these
houses. I guess the argument can be made that every single structure should not be changed”
(Angelette, “Property Owner” 14B). On the opposing side were several community members
who hoped to persuade the McMahons to sell the houses instead. Once the moratorium was
pronounced unconstitutional, several local preservationists, architects, and realtors came forward
in the hopes of convincing the McMahons to sell, not destroy, the houses. A November 14,
1997, article documents one such attempt:
. . . Carolyn Bennett, executive director for the Foundation for a Historical Louisiana,
said she hopes the McMahon family will consider offers from people interested in buying
the homes before going forward with demolition plans.
"We've asked if we can continue to try and find someone to buy the properties,"
Bennett said. "We've tried all along to continue the dialogue.”
Bennett said the McMahon‟s [sic] have repeatedly expressed concern about
selling houses that contain asbestos and lead paint.
"They're an old Baton Rouge family. If they're sincere about transferring without
liability, that can be done," she said.
(Angelette, “Moratorium Resolution Struck Down” 2B)
Apparently, the family was not “sincere,” since they tore down all the houses. A final anecdote
tells of Barbe, in a clown suit, holding balloons, and waving adieu to the neighbors as she rides
the dump truck that holds the debris. Who IS this woman? The Beauregard scenario leaves me
even more puzzled about why the house on Convention remains. I know the place has appeal for
me, but I wonder what motivates the McMahons to keep it up unkempt.
28
My project was instigated by my fascination with an old “abandoned” house of
architectural interest and nostalgic import to me. Bernd Jager, calling on Martin Heidegger‟s
terminologies, describes this attachment as a primary function of “building.” He writes,
“[b]uilding is first a being near a place, a haunting of a site, an eagerness for a manifestation and
an obedience to what presents itself there. Building already begins in this approach to a site. Its
fundamental activity is that of situating” (223; emphases in original). I have situated myself in
archival, anecdotal, theoretical, and physical positions that might allow me access to the stories
the house holds in its structures and the structures of its memories. Like Jager and in contrast to
the usual ideas about haunting, I am the one who haunts the house, not the reverse. I am the one
who digs up its past and pokes about in its personal and public life story. I am the one who
drives by and walks by. I am the one who takes photographs and attempts a peek through the
windows for glimpses of what I cannot see. If I had a chance, I would go inside and listen to the
echoes as I walk across the wooden floors, smell inside the fireplace for signs of use, run my
hand along the staircase railing as I ascend to the second floor to look out from the window at the
change of seasons year after year and, through it all, remain intact, resolute, and hopeful.
HOW TO MAKE A POPUP HOUSE/HOUSE POP UP
To inhabit and build the histories of 310 Convention, conventional wisdom might suggest
the following tips. They were excerpted from Researching the History of Your House, A Brief
Guide by John Sykes, which I received in a handout at a meeting for the Preservation Society of
Baton Rouge.
Getting Started
In order to research the history of your house, you have to know its legal description.
Check your deed for a description of your property; it should provide your lot number
and a block number for its location
29
Who Lived Here First?
Tracing a property‟s ownership is somewhat like researching a family tree and many of
the same resources can provide important clues to unravel the history of your house. For
every property in the parish, the assessor‟s office has a small card for every lot which
denotes the ownership information. Be sure to note every reference on the card. These
are important clues that refer to probate records and conveyance records concerning your
property.
Using Court House Records
When researching a property‟s title (really, the history of its ownership), you should start
with what you know and work backwards.
Conveyance Records-----record the transfer of property from one individual to another.
The seller (vendor) and the buyer (vendee) can be found in microfilm indexes which will
provide the date of the transaction and a reference to the original document or its copy in
a conveyance book.
Probate Records------in the case of the death of an owner, property passes to heirs, and
this transfer might not appear in the conveyance records. Individuals die testate (with a
will) or intestate (without a will), and in either case, in order to dispose of their property,
a “succession” record must be filed.
Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
The Sanborn Fire Insurance Company of Chicago regularly provided maps of local
communities which detailed the construction details of houses and the location of the
nearest fire prevention equipment. (These maps provided local insurance underwriters
information in which to provide rates for homeowners.) Originally contained in large
books, these map “sheets” contained several blocks and were updated about every five
years. These are an excellent source for learning the evolution of a house over time.
Census Records
The U. S. Constitution requires the enumeration of the citizens every ten years for the
purposes of determining representation in Congress. For these censuses, each resident of
town is identified with a specific address, listing every resident of the house, their age,
occupation, and information about literacy and birth. (Sykes 1-3; emphases in original)
Such wisdom is quite helpful in discovering what the neighborhood was and is called,
how the land and house were passed down over time, who built the house and when, who owns
the house now, and how it and the surrounding neighborhood have changed over the years. I
have gained much in the way of archival knowledge about my house through the official
channels Sykes suggests. The problem, as I see it, is what to do with the information. Will the
30
certainties help me answer the elusive question of why the house “called” me in the first place?
What is it trying to say? Maybe the better question is what am I trying to say? Or make the
house say? Or make the documents say? And why do I desire to make the house say anything at
all? Why not just let it be (present tense), be a presence in the shifting landscape of a
(re)developing downtown?
One possible answer is a selfish desire for a little space in my life, a place to call my own
as Virginia Woolf might have it. With my family of four, I have spent my adult years as a
squirrelly peg trying to fit into a number of small square abodes: a concrete and claustrophobic
student barrack; a once rural ranch house remote from the centers of my life outside the home; a
cramped and crumbling cottage close to everything, but impossible to keep clean and
uncluttered. What I would do for even a small space full of windows that let in the light where I
could draw a breath without distraction. Perhaps I inhabit 310 Convention to create this bit o‟
respite, situating myself in the screen porch on the second floor to catch the breeze from the
nearby Mississippi River, or in the bay window with a book, a fire blazing beneath the mantle, or
on the front porch in the morning with a cup of coffee, watching the downtown work force
arrive. Perhaps I inhabit and build 310 to knock myself free and into a more fitting space and
place.
To Create Your Dream House:
Step 1: Begin with an 8 1/2" x 11" piece of construction paper or card stock.
Step 2: Fold the construction paper in half to form a card.
Step 3: Draw two lines of equal height towards the fold of the card. Angle the one at the
top downwards; make sure the angled line is still the same height as the bottom one.
Step 4: Cut along both lines starting at the folded edge.
Step 5: Fold the cut section back . . .
Step 6: . . . and crease well along the edge with your thumb or finger.
Step 7: Put the cut strip back in its original position.
Step 8: Open the card up like a tent.
Step 9: Using your thumbs, push the cut strip through to the other side of the card.
Step 10: Close the card . . .
31
Step 11: . . . and press firmly.
Step 12: Open the card!
You've made a house pop-up!
Figure 4. A Pop Up House (“Simple Pop-ups You Can Make”)
If only it were so easy to make my house pop up, to figure out what might be important
about an empty dwelling. If only I could make and decorate a card and have it lovingly admired
by the receiver(s) due largely to my efforts and because it was special to me. I do not think the
task will be as simple as a paper version of a child‟s dream house. For one, the focus of my
research is an actual place, a physical house that sits in a specific location. How do I evoke its
material presence on the written page and acknowledge all that I leave out? Do the archival texts
and images accomplish evocation or lack? There is no doubt they participate in the performance
of the house as they too are created by others who have “had” the house and, perhaps, “hold” on
to it too. Subjective filters are not only the domain of the poetic and personal. The archives are
riddled with agents and their acts of choice, value, and will that influence the subsequent forms
and meanings.
I have projected a narrative on the house correlating to the mystery of its histories and
current state, and the fantasy of unraveling that mystery. By exploring archival and anecdotal,
theoretical and practical, personal and public means of investigation, I have made 310
Convention into a domain of research. I build, inhabit, and now dwell upon this place as a way
32
to ask broader questions about how human beings make space perform in everyday life and
scholarly applications. In Poetry, Language, Thought, Martin Heidegger reflects on the idea of
dwelling as a fundamentally human endeavor for interacting with and making sense of the world:
To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the
free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of
dwelling is this sparing and preserving. It pervades dwelling in its whole range. That
range reveals itself to us as soon as we reflect that human being consists in dwelling and,
indeed, dwelling in the sense of the stay of mortals on the earth. (147; emphasis in
original)
My goal is to dwell, to spare and preserve 310 Convention with the tools I discover and apply in
my investigation. I don‟t want to alter the house or own it. As much as I would like to gain
inside access to the house and its past, I am content to let it be “in peace” if it can operate as a
way of understanding some of the larger questions of how we dwell.
The Oxford English Dictionary includes the following definitions for dwell:
dwell, v. 4. To abide or continue for a time, in a place, state, or condition. b. to let dwell:
to let (things) remain as they are, let alone, let be. Obs. dwell on, upon (in): to spend time
upon or linger over (a thing) in action or thought; to remain with the attention fixed on;
now, esp. to treat at length or with insistence, in speech or writing; also, to sustain (a
note) in music. (The most frequent current use in speech.) 6. To continue in existence, to
last, persist; to remain after others are taken or removed. (OED v.; emphases in original)
I have let myself dwell in 310 Convention, investigating why the place has been left to dwell for
so long. I dwell on my research as a means to provide for the house‟s continued dwelling on
Convention Street and according to the conventions of the text. The OED even has a title for
me: I am a dwelleress, or dwelster, “a female dweller” (OED, n.). The first term can denote the
dreaming dweller, a subjective reveler at home in the magical space of the imagination that a
place invokes. Dwelster refers to a detective, puzzler, or archeologist. She also is a bricoleur
who patches together research clues in the space of a text so as to put in place a reason for
dwelling on an abode. Inhabit, build, situate, dwell – these terms are theoretical and practical
33
tools that function as both subject and predicate of the statements and stories about 310
Convention.
(EN) TITLE (MENT)
In my research to date, I find there are many terms I can use to discuss my house and its
stories. In my struggle to articulate just what it is about 310 Convention that interests me, issues
of language, interpretation, and theorization arise. One issue concerns how history is conveyed
through language and it is addressed by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals. He
writes:
Thus the whole history of a thing, an organ, a custom, becomes a continuous chain of
reinterpretations and arrangements which need not be causally connected among
themselves, which may simply follow one another. The “evolution” of a thing, a custom,
an organ is not its progressus towards a goal, let alone the most logical and shortest
progressus, requiring the least energy and expenditure. Rather, it is a sequence of more
or less profound, more or less independent processes of appropriation, including the
resistances used in each instance, the attempted transformation for purposes of defense or
reaction, as well as the results of successful counterattacks. While forms are fluid, their
“meaning” is even more so. (210; emphases in original)
Nietzsche‟s language for understanding history is that of combat and conquest, but also of
unending ebb and flow. The tidal shifts that constitute the interpretive acts of documenting (a)
history continually reformat the landscape of that history and reinvent the formations inscribed
upon it – like the waves that (re)turn the morning sand castles into the afternoon sea floor and
then the evening footpath by the shore. This story of history carries the grains of plot, scene, and
character within the liquid forces of interpretation, extrapolation, and appropriation that make it
always anew in the telling.
Once upon a time, a friend asked me how I came to discover the meaning of Barbe‟s
name. I answered that sometimes I stray from my determined research into less determined
areas. (I stray from dwelster to dwelleress.) In this case, after weeks of reading various
34
theoretical tracts relevant to my study, I decided to mess around with what the surnames of the
owners might reveal, particularly that of the main protagonist in the current narrative of the
house, Claudia Barbe McMahon. What might these proper names reveal about the woman and
her relationship to my house? I discovered that Claudia is the feminine form of the Roman name
Claudius from the Latin claudus, meaning lame or crippled. Barbe is a French form of Barbara
and means foreign woman. The saint named Barbara has some interesting parallels to our
protagonist:
St Barbara has always been one of the most popular saints in the calendar, although there
is some doubt whether she ever existed. According to legend, she was imprisoned in a
tower and later murdered by her father, who was then struck down by a bolt of lightning;
accordingly, she is the patron of architects, stonemasons, and fortifications, and of
firework makers, artillerymen, and gunpowder magazines. (“The Barbara Surname”)
Let us just . . . dwell here a minute. I know from my genealogical research that Barbe is
Claudia‟s mother‟s maiden name, of French origin, and given as a middle name to her daughter.
It is the name Claudia prefers and I suppose, given the definitions noted above, I might prefer it
too.
While acting as dwelleress in the less determined realm of user generated encyclopedic
knowledge, I came across the notion that Saint Barbara‟s tale is akin to that of Rapunzel. The
analogy makes sense to some degree. According to a folklore classification system referenced at
answers.com, “[t]he story of Rapunzel is an example of Aarne-Thompson type 310 The Maiden
in the Tower. . . . It contains many fairy tale fragmentary themes: the Forbidden Fruit, the
Womanly Wiles, a Hard Bargain . . . [and] the Unseen Watcher” (“Rapunzel”). Type 310? This
is getting weird. It may be a coincidence, but the house I am investigating is at 310 Convention
Street; the woman who owns it prefers to be called by a derivation of the name of the patron
saint of architecture and, given her penchant for controversy, of fireworks and artillery men too;
35
she drives a hard bargain; and has an unseen watcher. There is the matter of the 2002
incorporation of the property as a limited liability company, giving it the ominous name of “Big
House 310, LLC.” A plantation or a prison? What‟s in a name?
According to Jacques Derrida, I am experiencing the chain of differences that constitute
the process of naming, of signification itself:
Thus the name, especially the so-called proper name, is always caught in a chain or a
system of differences. It becomes an appellation only to the extent that it may inscribe
itself within a figuration. Whether it be linked by its origin to the representations of
things in space or whether it remains caught in a system of phonic differences or social
classifications apparently released from ordinary space, the proper-ness of the name does
not escape spacing. Metaphor shapes and undermines the proper name. The literal
[propre] meaning does not exist, its “appearance” is a necessary function – and must be
analyzed as such – in the system of differences and metaphors. (Of Grammatology 89)
Barbe‟s chosen moniker seems to have chosen her. It is inscribed in her activities and
associations. In the space of her life and history, her name is caught up in a chain of
representations that point to ancestry, the family homestead, local politics, fairytales and
folklore, and one girl‟s dissertation. She is a wily woman, protecting family property, explosive
in her confrontations with others, fortifying her heritage from without, and denying access to the
forbidden fruit of this or any other place in the family arsenal. As for my place in the chain, I am
the un/seen watcher, gathering what I can from the shadows of documents, theory, and practice.
The phonic resonance of Barbe‟s name works as a homonym for another layer of
meaning, namely that of a barb that hooks onto or into one and is difficult to dislodge. Like a
hook or an arrow, a barb articulates and activates “a recurved process” (OED, n. 1). I wonder
what it is that gets recurved in this process. If we are talking about a fish hook or spear head,
then definition twelve seems fitting: “[a] projection from the main body of something; esp. a
natural appendage, extension, or outgrowth; a projection, prominence, protuberance” (OED, n.
36
12). In the OED definition of process, there is a definite sense of things moving in space and
time toward some fruition:
1. a. The fact of going on or being carried on, as an action, or a series of actions or
events; progress, course. 2. Course, lapse (of time). 4. a. A narration, narrative; relation,
story, tale; a discourse or treatise; an argument or discussion. 6. d. A linguistic operation
or change. 8. Onward movement in space; procession; progress, progression. (OED, n.)
Further, there appears to be intent and purpose in the movement. A recurved process then would
seem to be one that rejects the implied linearity of forward progress in favor of movement that
turns back on itself, like the ebb and flow of the tide. This movement gains strength from the
curve or fold of matter and energy back onto itself. The difficulty lies in figuring out how the
many recurved progressions operate together – within, upon, or against each other – in terms of
my research, Barbe‟s investment, and the house‟s in/stability. Additionally, there is the matter of
the linguistic operation that this text produces. Inevitably, the discourses I draw on and create to
narrate my progress folds back onto the page, but will it have the strength to hook the reader,
extending the house in a system of differences in the space of the page? There is no way not to
change the house in the recurved process from lived experience into an archival document of a
present that is already past. What is left on the page when all is said and done? A
transformation created as I dwell on the nexus of this place in the space of text.
The progression of this document is my attempt to safeguard the nature of my
relationship with the house, dwelling on possible variations of interpretation and arrangement
that un/fold in the course of my fixation. As a dwelster in this process, I find my way is not
forward moving but a series of recurves. Each link is unique, forming a fluid sequence in its
relationship to others. Interconnections operate to form the course of my narrative and the
advancement of a treatise. In terms of the municipal appellation for the house – i.e. Convention
– I am “summoning an assembly” of information, ideas, and practices that I organize according
37
to “general agreement or consent” into an “assemblage” that is evocative of my experiences with
the house and the associations it generates (OED, n.I.).
MODEL HOUSE/ HOUSE MODEL
How do I construct my assemblage? How do I piece together the various materials I have
gathered and created over the years into an inhabitable research space that allows me (and you, if
you‟d like) to linger and dwell in this house? What models might I use?
One theoretical model I discovered is that of chora. The idea came (back) to me when
one of my colleagues expressed that she wanted to change her name from Corey to Cora. Her
desire evoked the dwelleress in me. Cora. Where have I heard that word before? I scanned my
bookshelf of poetry and found William Carlos Williams‟ Kora in Hell. The text consists of a
series of reflections Williams wrote each night for a year after spending his days as physician.
The reflections are written as prose poems and include interpretive notes in italics. Williams
considered the text as the foundational model for his later works. Kora is a variation of the
goddess of springtime in Greek mythology. She was captured and taken to hell, where she was
consigned to live during the winters, until emerging to the surface of the earth as spring. In
Kora, Williams found a kindred spirit and the text marks his efforts to escape from his hell(s)
through his creative composition.
I also returned to Plato and found that, in Timaeus, chora is Plato‟s term for the place in
which the eternal Forms of Being (models) are imprinted upon the transitory sensory objects of
Becoming (copies). This place is difficult for Plato to define because it straddles the two realms
of knowledge, Reason and Opinion, that he feels correspond to Being and Becoming. He writes,
. . . ever-existing Place, which admits not of destruction, and provides room for all things
that have birth, itself being a kind of bastard reasoning by the aid of non-sensation, barely
an object of belief; for when we regard this we dimly dream and affirm that it is
somehow necessary that all that exists should exist in some spot and occupying some
38
place, and that that which is neither on earth or in the Heaven is nothing. So because of
all these and other kindred notions, we are unable also on waking up to distinguish
clearly the unsleeping and truly subsisting substance, owing to our dreamy condition, or
to state the truth – how that it belongs to a copy – seeing that it has not for its own even
that substance for which it came into being, but fleets as a phantom of something else – to
come into existence in some other thing. (123-125; emphases in original)
Chora has a status that seems untenable within and yet is necessary to Plato‟s system of
philosophy. It is a space that cannot be aptly expressed in language because there is “nothing” to
describe there. Yet Plato must make a place for this space in his thinking. The fact that he lacks
adequate language to describe chora does not diminish the importance of the concept. In
essence, chora becomes a metaphor for the space that exists between our thoughts and
experiences and the language(s) we use to express them. Chora is the wakeful dream state in
which we struggle to express the images that emerge from sensation, ideation, and imagination.
Derrida expands on Plato‟s notion of chora through essays, interviews, and letters in
Chora L Works, a collaborative text commissioned in 1985 that provides a theoretical foundation
for a garden design in the Parc de la Villette in Paris. Bernard Tschumi was the lead architect on
the project and invited Derrida and architect Peter Eisenman to collaborate with him. Tschumi
wanted the park to contain a series of follies, understood not as errors but rather delights
reflective of the “madness” of architectural design at the time. The OED explains:
Folly, n. 4. Madness, insanity, mania. 5. a. A popular name for any costly structure
considered to have shown folly in the builder. R. Wendover says that when (in 1228) a
castle which Hubert de Burgh had begun to build, near the Welsh border, had to be razed
to the ground on account of a treaty concluded with the Welsh, much amusement was
excited by the recollection that Hubert had given to the building on its foundation the
name of Hubert's Folly (Stultitiam Huberti). It was remarked that he had shown himself
a true prophet. Probably the word used by Hubert was F. folie; the original meaning
seems to have been not stultitia, but “delight”, “favourite abode”. Many houses in France
still bear the name La Folie, and there is some evidence that “the Folly” was as late as the
nineteenth century used in some parts of England for a public pleasure-garden or the like.
b. pl. A revue notable for the glamour of its female performers; used esp. as a title, as
Ziegfeld Follies; also, the female members of such a revue. (OED, n1
; emphases in
original)
39
In Chora L Works, Derrida suggests that the collaborators play with and within the restrictions of
certain terms in order to design their garden. He bases their play on the multiple interpretations
of Plato‟s Timaeus, particularly the many meanings that arise in scholars‟ attempts to define
chora, for example, in terms of “‟place,‟ „location,‟ „site,‟ „region,‟ „country‟” or as a metaphor
for “„mother,‟ „nurse,‟ „receptacle,‟ „imprint bearer‟” (16). In their play with forms of chora
and folly, the collaborators settle on the images of a sieve, lyre, and grid for their design.
In reflecting on Chora L Works, Derrida expresses a key aspect in his composition of
texts:
I have this feeling that when I write, when I build some texts, the law for me, the rule, has
to do with the spacing of things. What interests me is not really the content but some
distribution in space. The way that I write is shaped. It has to do with rhythm of music
on the one hand, but also with building, with architecture, with spacing. When I am
interested in what I write I am certain it has not to do with the content, with the meaning
or with the philosophical meaning, but with the way these objects are articulated in the
way that the composition of my text corresponds to models that are not well received in
the architectural association of philosophy. And so they are physical objects. And when
I am attached to them it is as such. (109)
In Derrida‟s articulation of the importance of space and spacing in building his texts, he
simultaneously implies chora, which “is the spacing which is the condition for everything to take
place, for everything to be inscribed. The metaphor of impression or printing is very strong and
recognizable in this text. It is the place where everything is received as an imprint” (10).
Notably, the practical manifestation of Chora L Works was never installed in Parc de la Villette;
rather, it was installed, imprinted in Derrida‟s document. It emerges through the physicalization
of visual and written languages in the space of the page. Thereby, Chora L Works performs
place (imprint) in space due to the possibilities of spacing. On the one hand, Derrida‟s
enactment of chora is akin to Plato‟s concept since it “has not for its own even that substance for
which it came into being, but fleets as a phantom of something else – to come into existence in
40
some other thing” (Plato 125; emphases in original). On the other hand, for Derrida, since chora
is spacing, it has no origin substance for which it came into being. (There is no origin substance
in Derrida‟s philosophy of language.) It is and always refers, defers to some other thing and
therein lies the delight, the folly, of chora.
In Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, Gregory Ulmer draws on Derrida‟s interpolations
of chora in Plato‟s Timaeus and attempts to create a new rhetoric that addresses the
particularities of producing, reading, and translating hypermedia. In contrast to the singular
proof of argumentative writing, Ulmer proposes a generative process of discovery where one
draws on and produces “a database . . . the full paradigm of possibilities through which a
multitude of paths may be traced” (38). By acknowledging the multiple meanings of key
concepts, the researcher becomes a collector and arranger of data that is “unified by a pattern of
repetition, rather than by a concept . . . more like discovery than proof” (56). The idea and
realization of a collection, which can be re/arranged by both the producer and reader of a text,
activates the positions of those who engage it. Ulmer names his experimental method
chorography. The term evokes the body spaces, or positionalities, of those who engage and
produce a text:
While chorography as a term is close to choreography, it duplicates a term that already
exists in the discipline of geography, thus establishing a valuable resonance for a rhetoric
of invention concerned with the history of “place” in relation to memory. Within
geography “chorological analysis” produces a sense of place “that is similar to the sense
of time that comes from the subject of history,” trying to capture a more subjective
dimension of spatiality in specific rather than in generic terms. (39)
The memory and position of the researcher (whether writer or reader) influences how the text is
re/generated. One‟s spatial and temporal location in relation to the texts and contexts of analysis
creates a place for new imaginative constructions to emerge. Whereas Plato separates being and
becoming, and Derrida fuses them through the emergence of language in the space of the page
41
(so that being is always becoming), Ulmer recognizes the body memory and position of the
reader and writer as part of Derridian (e)mergence.
TRANSFORMATION: A LITTLE STORY ABOUT HOUSE DREAMS/DREAM HOUSES
Three-ten Convention is my springtime. It is an un/folding chain of possibilities that
compels me to situate myself within it. My narrative takes shape as a description of a house
formed from an assemblage of experiences and materials I imprint here. In William Carlos
Williams‟ follow up to Kora in Hell, a prose-poetry piece titled Spring and All, he finds the key
to reaching that season beyond winter‟s hell:
Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or
situations. . . . It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no
personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the
indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is
not a mirror up to nature but –
As birds‟ wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the
imagination affirm reality by their flight. (149-150)
Spring emerges in the space and spacing (the chora) of the imagination. The objects created
from imagination‟s inventions provide a means to generate new possibilities for the subjects of
research.
Like Williams, Derrida, and Ulmer, the space of chora is not real for performance folks
either. Rather, in their vernacular, it is the space of the fictive real where physical bodies and
language in space make manifest the possibilities that (rational) “real” life would deem
impossible. As with my performance in this chapter, performance practitioners build and dwell
in this space, experimenting with ways to express the connections and the differences between
the fictive real and “real” so that the possibilities they discover and enact are apparent to an
audience. As I also have tried to express in this chapter, one way performance practitioners
articulate the differences is through the transformation of language forms and conventions or,
42
more precisely perhaps, they acknowledge and highlight this operation as one we exercise daily,
but tend to ignore or elide.
In this chapter, my fictive real, chora folly is that of the popup book, two models of
which the Popup Lady describes on her website:
METAMORPHOSIS (or TRANSFORMATION) – Convention uses these terms
interchangeably for two different mechanisms.
1. Two circular illustrations sharing one center axis have pie-shaped cuts which will
allow them to intersect when moved (usually by a string or tab) so that the top
illustration will rotate over the bottom illustration allowing the bottom illustration to
show through. The top illustration “metamorphoses” or “transforms” into the bottom
illustration. (Also called DISSOLVING WHEEL)
2. Two illustrations are slit like Venetian blinds vertically or horizontally. When pulled
by a tab or ribbon, one illustration will slide over the other, “metamorphosing” or
“transforming” into the other. (Rubin; emphases in original)
In the OED, metamorphosis and transformation share the same definition in their initial entries.
Both are actions “changing in form, shape, or substance” (OED, n.1 a.). Metamorphosis,
however, implies the “supernatural means” (OED, n.1.a.) of an outside force that changes “the
form or character of (something)” (“metamorphisize” OED, v.1.) and thereby erases the former
elements entirely in the manifestation of the new. Transformation, on the other hand, is a
double-directed action that retains and acknowledges the traces of the old in the new. The art of
transformation is evident in the traditions of theatre and performance as is the case with the
“mechanical disclosing scene in a pantomime; spec. the scene in which the principal performers
were transformed in view of the audience into the players of the ensuing harlequinade” (OED
n.1.c.). Transformation is then an action that humans create rather than an action exercised on
them by an outside force of fate or the gods.
In her descriptions of popup books, the Popup Lady veers more toward transformation
than metamorphosis. Both the dissolving wheel and venetian blind mechanisms require active
43
audiences to make the transformations occur through the pulling of tabs, and both retain traces of
the old images in the new. The process of transformation in popup books recurves past and
present and, thereby, questions conventional terms and perspectives regarding time and space,
particularly those that equate forward moving time to progress, and presence as a dictate of
“being” and “becoming.” The possibilities of chora in and as spacing suggest otherwise and
serve as a means of modeling 310 Convention on the page.
Figure 5. Venetian Blind Popup (illustration by Burton; photo by the author)
While significant issues regarding how material culture, such as a Victorian house,
performs history are entailed here, we also might remind ourselves that chora entails folly. That
is, folly is part of performing history in this case. Derrida likewise called on folly in modeling a
space upon the page. The British organization, The Folly Fellowship, builds a like relationship
between history and folly when they submit that their goal is to protect lonely and unloved
buildings of little purpose from being rationalised or destroyed” (“The Folly Fellowship: Aims”).
Rationalization allows for fixed notions of historical value that can lead to the destruction of
“lonely and unloved” places; while chora and folly unfix singular values, suggesting how to
compose the histories of such places in different ways. This chapter does not erase
rationalization, but adds to the processes allowing multiple values to arise through eureka
moments, word play, and arbitrary associations that write a history of the house so as to preserve
44
and spare it. In the upcoming chapters, I continue to inhabit, dwell in, and build 310 Convention
through the transformative processes of chora.
supposing i dreamed this)
only imagine, when day has thrilled
you are a house around which
i am a windyour
walls will not reckon how
strangely my life is curved
since the best he can do
is to peer through windows, unobserved
-listen, for (out of all
things)dream is noone's fool;
if this wind who i am prowls
carefully around this house of you
love being such, or such,
the normal corners of your heart
will never guess how much
my wonderful jealousy is dark
Figure 6. Dissolving Wheel (illustrations by Burton)
if light should flower:
or laughing sparkle from
the shut house (around and around
which a poor wind will roam
(Cummings 97)
45
CHAPTER THREE
HOUSE OF WAX
“I am a Bee, (no Drone) tho‟ without sting
Here you may see, what Honey-Combs I bring . . .
What others did Contrive, I carry to my Hive.”
-Pastorius quoted in Erben
„“Honey Combs‟ and „Paper Hives‟” (163-164)
Three-ten Convention is more than a specific locale. It is a lot of land, a city address, a
building, an uninhabited dwelling, someone‟s house, maps, conveyance records, photographs,
and news clippings, to name but a few of its transformations. The Victorian town house that sits
semi-abandoned next to a parking lot and a high rise also comprises the various stories, texts, and
images I use to construct it on the page. This empty site is full of imaginative possibility, and I
find I model the house in multiple forms, morphing the structure of this document in an effort to
document the structure of my research.
This process of assembly and transformation compelled me to search for additional ways
to experience and understand 310 Convention. In the spring of 2003, I took an anthropologyarchitecture
class called Vernacular Architecture and Material Culture in hopes of adding to my
repertoire of research tools. Professor Jay Edwards introduced me to many of the archival
practices used to investigate a building‟s history. The collecting practices I learned offered me
new ways to inhabit the house and tell its tale.
One of my favorite practices is the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, hereafter referred to as
the Sanborn Maps or, simply, the maps. From 1867 through 1970, the Sanborn Map Company
developed and published the maps, which were used by insurance companies to assess the risk of
insuring buildings. The maps provide large scale plans of cities and towns across the US,
tracking their growth and development over intervening years. The Baton Rouge Public Library
holds the hard bound versions of the maps for Baton Rouge in three separate volumes that cover
46
the period from 1923 through August 1951, although additional updates extend through 1963.
The online LSU archives hold additional maps, all black and white digital reproductions of the
originals. The online version offers ten progressive “books” for Baton Rouge dating from May
1885 through April 1951. My house can be found on Sheet 7 in Volume 1 of the 1923 through
August 1951 hard bound version. Online, it resides on Sheet 5 in the 1908, 1911, and 1916
books until it moves to Sheet 7 in the 1923 book and to Sheet 7 Volume I in the 1923-1947 and
1923-1951 books.1
In this chapter, I inhabit and dwell in the places and spaces of the maps in order to
explore the stories they tell about my house. Further, their performance serves as a model for my
research process and performance in this chapter; for how I perceive, conceive, and document
the histories of the house as map(ped). To learn to perform like the maps and, thereby, better
understand their performance – the substance and structures of language they collect and use to
(trans)form the house – I made an actual three-dimensional model of the house, which I also
discuss in this chapter.
My experience and understanding of the maps is that of an archive in action – a hive – in
which the process of collecting and composing the sustenance of honeyed knowledge occurs
simultaneously. The idea of the hive as an archival endeavor can be traced back to the
manuscripts of Daniel Pastorius (1651-1719), founder of Germantown in Pennsylvania and a key
figure in colonial politics and society. I first discovered Pastorius online in a brochure about an
exhibit at the Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania.
The exhibit was called, “The Revolt of the Bees, Wherein the Future of the Paper-Hive is
1
In my text and “Works Cited,” I use the date 1923-1963 to reference the hard bound maps, so as to account for the
updates added to them (e.g., by means of overlays) after the maps were published. I cite the hard bound maps under
the title of the editor, Sanborn Map Company. For each digital map I analyze in my text, I use the discrete date of
the map, whereas in my “Works Cited” I do not. Instead, I reference all the digital maps under the archive title,
“Digital Sanborn Maps 1867-1970.” My choice reflects that the digital archive holds all the maps produced by the
company between 1867 and 1970, although the various maps for Baton Rouge extend from 1885 to 1951 only.
47
Declared.” Drawing on books and manuscripts from the Annenberg collection, the exhibit
explored “a new culture of memory and archiving in the true spirit of the beehive” (University of
Pennsylvania Holdings 2). Pastorius‟ ideas were activated in the main theme of the archive as a
hive, and they were detailed in lesson two of the eleven lessons displayed in the exhibit. His
manuscript, titled The Bee-Hive, contains a distilled collection of quotations culled from his
voracious readings, and his insights and observations on contemporary issues. According to the
curators of the exhibit, “[a]gainst the frequent analogy of the museum as mausoleum and
columbarium for the storage and preservation of cultural artifact, Pastorius‟ The Bee-Hive
implies a dynamic and perpetually changing model for archival practice” (University of
Pennsylvania Holdings 4). He wrote the book as a source of contemporary wisdom for his
progeny to reflect on and use, and also as a model they might follow in composing encyclopedic
texts of their own knowledge.
Cultural historian Patrick Erben recognizes Pastorius‟ work as indicative of a broader
method, in which “the process of collecting and composing simultaneously engages the
experiential and concrete world outside the text, the intellectual world of his reading and writing
and, finally, the physical compilation and representation of his knowledge on the pages of his
manuscript books” (Erben 163). In terms of the hive, Pastorius‟ process transforms the nectar of
his learning into the fuel of his thoughts (the honey stored within the hive) and the structure of
his arguments on the page (the wax honeycomb). This process of collection, distillation, and
transformation parallels that of chora in the research and production of a text. Chora reflects the
cycle of the seasons in the springtime production of honeyed knowledge in the collective
dwelling of the hive or text.
Those who study and raise honey bees look at a colony not as a collection of individual
creatures, but as “an individual, a „compound animal,‟ a body with thousands of detachable cells
48
or organs – the bees. Each bee is capable of a limited sphere of activity whilst at some distance
from the hive, but is still linked with the rest of the body in interests and is always working for
the community” (Wadey 13). Each bee of the body acts for the greater good of the collective in
all its endeavors, which are designed so as to maximize the future of the hive as a whole. The
main food source of bees is the honey they produce by gathering nectar from flowers, of which
only a small portion is digested immediately. The bulk of the nectar is “regurgitated into a cell
of one of the combs” for future consumption (Harris 45). The honey combs are made of wax, or
bee fat, which is a secondary byproduct of their nectar gathering and honey conversion. The
process of converting nectar into wax requires a huge amount of energy and raw material as “for
every one ounce of wax produced, at least a pound of honey is consumed by the bees” (Harris
54). The constant collection required to sustain the hive and the effort involved in transforming
the nectar articulate the processes necessary to compose the hive‟s continued sustenance and
structure.
Another intriguing aspect of the archive as hive trope concerns the worker bees. Their
job entails seeking out food sources, communicating the locations to other workers, sharing their
take with others in the hive, producing the wax, and constructing the combs that house the
colony. The worker bee approaches her duties as both dwelleress and dwelster in her labors:
When she first leaves the hive to collect nectar, water, or pollen, she embarks on a
voyage of discovery. She may have to find a predetermined source of nectar of which
she has been given a sample by another bee. . . . She may, on the other hand, be a freelance,
seeking pastures for herself, and prepared to work on any kind of flower she finds
to be yielding nectar in abundance. (Wadey 31)
In either case, the worker collects her nectar as resource for projects that benefit the future of the
hive. Her efforts also benefit and benefit from the food sources, a symbiotic relationship
developed between the bee and the plants from which she gathers the nectar. The plants need the
bees for cross pollination, which in turn sustains future supplies for the hive.
49
Building on the hive as metaphor, I use the Sanborn Maps as nectar to produce a paper
hive that holds the honeyed knowledge I gain from this archive. The process parallels Erben‟s
articulation of the components in Pastorius‟ model. My experience with the materiality of the
maps in both the digital and hard bound versions coupled with the conceptual discourse I collect
and make are transformed in their representation on the page and as a three-dimensional model.
Both form (wax) structures that contain and contribute to the uniquely flavored honey thoughts
distilled from the nectar of the maps.
NECTAR COLLECTING
In Professor Edwards‟ class on Vernacular Architecture and Material Culture, we are
assigned to do historical research on a building or dwelling of our choice. I convince a colleague
in Performance Studies who is also taking the class to make the focus of our projects local,
downtown buildings. Interested in a house in the downtown district of Beauregard Town, my
friend agrees. In class, Professor Edwards tells us about the Sanborn Maps, stressing that they
are important tools for researching local buildings. He also informs us that the maps are located
in the Baton Rouge Room in the River Center Branch Library of the East Baton Rouge Parish
Library System. Professor Edwards‟s detailed directives suggest we would be remiss if we
didn‟t take a look at the maps and so we head downtown to investigate.
Upon entering the square, concrete and glass library, my friend and I are greeted by the
circulation librarians at work behind the counter. We inquire about access to the Baton Rouge
Room. One of the librarians tells us that the man who oversees the collection is at lunch, but that
she would be willing to chaperone us until he returns. We take the tiny, creaky elevator to the
fourth floor and approach a locked glass door that leads to a small room on our left. The
librarian is very friendly and inquires about our research as she opens the door. We tell her
about 310 Convention and the house in Beauregard Town. The librarian does not know about
50
my house, but tells my friend she has been to parties at “her” house in the 1970s when it
belonged to a good friend. Go figure. She shows us drawers full of maps and charts and other
documents, and points out the Sanborn Maps on top of one of the drawers. She also takes us into
a back room – deep inside this particular archive – where there are file boxes and folders full of
photos and small mementos. My friend‟s uncanny luck continues when she chances upon a
photo of her house in Beauregard Town while I poke about hoping for something on my house to
pop up too.
Soon, the man in charge of the collection returns. Although the librarian explains our
projects to him (then bids adieu), he seems very edgy about our being there. We sidle out of the
back room as he sidles in to inspect (we imagine) what we might have displaced there. We begin
to look through the drawers in the front room and find documents ranging from Spanish and
French language property maps to the diagrams for the Esso (now Exxon) plant located just
north of downtown along the river. Once, a drawer gets stuck and we think we hear a tear. We
carefully re-open the drawer to inspect for damage and, as carefully, close it again, deciding we
had better leave the drawers alone. We turn our attention to the large bound volumes of the
Sanborn Maps stacked on top of the drawer we have just closed.
My friend and I take a volume each and try to figure out how they work. The volumes
are large (2‟ x 2‟ x 3”) hard bound books with fabric covers and leather detailing. Lifting the
book requires exertion and opening its pages results in a cracking from the old spine that binds
the thick pages. The pages are yellowed with age and thick like cardstock. The weight supports
the many layers of yellow tissue or white paper overlays that indicate the additions and erasures
to the buildings over time. The inner lining of the cover is a repeating pattern of green wavy
lines on a white background. The ocean of lines is dotted with islands, each stamped with a
circular seal that consists of a compass rose around which turns the maker of the maps, the
51
“Sanborn Map Company.” Addendums to the index found on one of the first pages are pasted
on this lining, one atop the other, over time. The layers of the archive accumulate – addendums
on addendums, graphics on graphics, papers on papers, books on books, rooms in rooms, floors
on floors – and testify to the ongoing building of memory, the performance of remembering.
Figure 7. Cover and Front Matter
(Sanborn Map Company, Insurance Maps of Baton Rouge Louisiana, Volume 1 1923-1963)
The maps are contained within three volumes of approximately one hundred sheets each.
Each volume includes a “Graphic Map of Volumes” that shows a map of Baton Rouge divided
into three blocks of color. Each block refers to one of the three volumes. The map also
illustrates the radial development of the city in ripples outward from the river‟s edge and
downtown center to the suburbs in the north, east, and south. With a yellow block, the graphic
map indicates that Volume 1 contains the maps for the oldest neighborhoods in the city, which
includes that of 310 Convention.
In Volume I, I find another map or “Key Sheet” that (again) uses colored blocks to
indicate each neighborhood, and numbers to direct the viewer to the sheet on which the
52
neighborhood is detailed. Situated in a blue block of color, it appears 310 Convention can be
found on Sheet 7. (This is getting exciting; I wonder what will pop up next?)
Figure 8. Graphic Map of Volumes and Key Sheet
(Sanborn Map Company, Insurance Maps of Baton Rouge Louisiana, Volume 1 1923-1963)
I turn to Sheet 7. From an overhead view, I scan the page quickly in search of 310. My
eyes circle, narrow in, then land to dwell on my house. I am like a bee who has found the sweet
nectar at the yellow center of a colorful flower. I drink the map in.
The house is tinted yellow, which according to the color “Key” designates it as a wooden
structure or frame building. The buildings that surround the house are pink, which means they
are built of brick, or grey, which indicates that a fire resistant material of some kind was used in
building it. The numbers “1” and “2” indicate the number of stories. Three-ten is a two story
building except for the porches on the west and south sides. At the back of the lot is a one story
auto garage, designated by the letter “A.” The garage is built of wood also, but the grey line
around the yellow tells me it is metal clad. There are tissue and white paper overlays pasted on
the base page that show changes to the house although faint traces of the old details are visible
53
beneath. For instance, across the back of the house is a swath of white paper that shows a “new”
bay window porch extension in the southeast corner beneath which are lines that indicate that a
smaller squared off porch once stood there (too).
Figure 9. Sheet 7 Detail of 310 Convention Street and Color Key
(Sanborn Map Company, Insurance Maps of Baton Rouge Louisiana, Volume 1 1923-1963)
I also discover that each volume contains a “Skeleton Key” for each sheet that shows the
bare bones or outlines of the buildings. Sometimes, the outlines are papered over to indicate
changes that correspond to those on the colored sheets, but not always. In the skeleton for Sheet
7, I can see ghostly traces of four small structures beneath the white paper on which the garage is
drawn. One looks large enough to be a stable; the others for poultry perhaps, a tool shed, maybe
an outhouse? (I am reminded of my friend‟s house, built in 1928 and located in the Garden
District of Baton Rouge. The separate garage holds “facilities” – i.e., a shower, sink, and toilet –
which, we can only speculate, were to be used by the black employee(s) hired at one time to tend
54
to the house and garden.) The outline of the house does not yet reflect the addition of porches on
the front, west, and back sides of the house or the bay window extension on the southeast corner.
The key also notes that the property was once numbered 330.
Figure 10. Skeleton Key Detail of 310 Convention Street
(Sanborn Map Company, Insurance Maps of Baton Rouge Louisiana, Volume 1 1923-1963)
During my first visit, I realize there are two versions of Volume 1, each apparently
updated through a different date. One version (shown in Figure 9 above and Figure 11 below) is
updated through at least 1962 as indicated by the date on the grey building to the west of 310. In
1962, it appears the building was (re)constructed in fire resistant material with a reinforced floor,
frame, and roof, likely to support the two new cooling units on the roof. The other version (in
Figure 11) is updated through 1961 at most since the same building is of brick and without the
noted improvements. Next door at 310, there is a second auto garage and a two story porch on
the southeast corner, both of which are absent from the more recent version.
55
Figure 11. Sheet 7 Details of 310 Convention Street, Pre and Post 1962
(Sanborn Map Company, Insurance Maps of Baton Rouge Louisiana, Volume 1 1923-1963)
The nectar I gather from my initial journey through the Sanborn Maps transforms into
honeyed knowledge about 310. The nectar also provides me with a model for structuring
language in forms that both evoke my experience and are accessible, reliable. The (wax comb)
structure of the maps is integral to the making of the (honeyed) knowledge they recall and hold –
which is not to say there are not empty combs and excess honey. (When I saw that in 1962, or
thereabouts, cooling units were installed atop the building next door, I wondered if similar
perhaps smaller units were installed in my house. The question led to an empty answer, but gave
rise to a memory excess the maps cannot contain; namely, the ironic coincidence that cooling
units for comfort should become popular in the 1950‟s, anticipating it seems the social “heat” of
the sixties. Since this was the era when color televisions became popular, it would appear folks
could watch the social sparks from the cooling comfort of their homes. Perhaps these factors
56
contribute to the reason why the downtown area dwindled as a residential neighborhood during
this time, no activity outside the hive or pollination through social interaction.)
My interactions with the maps recurve to recall Erben‟s comments on Pastorius‟s process
of integrating concrete experiences and intellectual insights so as to produce an evocative text
that both contains and generates the knowledge produced. Such expressions are indicative of
performance studies scholarship that seeks to posit the experience of the researcher in interaction
with the archive as integral to the ensuing text‟s structure and expressive potential. 2
The
experience of opening the Sanborn Maps and entering into the layers upon layers of memory
highlight for me a research process that activates an archive already in action. It is an experience
and understanding of material culture embedded in the languages of the body-text.
PAPER COMBS AND HONEY
The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps offer a certain objectivity in the uniformity of their
language codes, as well as an historically and socially grounded context for interpreting what a
particular culture values in the transmission of historical detail. Developed in 1867 and used
through 1970, the maps were a product of economic exigency as insurance companies called on
them to check the extent of their liability for buildings damaged or destroyed by fire. They were
especially valuable early on when a single fire could wipe an entire city off the map. The crucial
color “Key” (see Figure 9), coded according to features that make a structure more or less fire
resistant, fulfills this functional role in that the noted icons refer to building materials and, hence,
a building‟s susceptibility to or ability to withstand fires. However, the craft involved in the
making the maps shows an attention to detail that moves beyond functionality. The maps or
2
This notion is fundamental to the concept and practices of mystory. For a self-identified mystory, see Bowman
and Bowman, “On the Bias.” For additional performance historiographies that activate the same idea, see Jackson,
Mavor, and Suchy.
57
rather the mapmaker tells stories about the cities and buildings he draws and, then, tints with
watercolor or covers with odd cuts of paper, adhered ever so carefully to the page.
One look at Sheet 7 (or any other sheet for that matter) demonstrates the amount of handcrafted
detail required to make the maps and, for some, insure insurer liability or lack thereof. In
addition to indicating the building materials of each structure, the mapmaker tells the type and
location of chimneys, the number of floors, doors, elevators, windows, and porches, and the
building‟s function. The mapmaker contexts each building within its neighborhood, including
such features as the streets and their names, sidewalk widths and property boundaries, house and
block numbers, fire stations and hydrants, railroads and other public transport, government
buildings, commercial buildings, large factories and what they produce.
By means of each sheet, the neighborhood “Key Sheet,” and the “Graphic Map of
Volumes” (see Figure 8), the mapmaker extends his purview to document the development of the
city over time. The lower numbers on the noted sheets and maps refer to the older
neighborhoods, which are located near the river in the downtown district. As the city grows, the
numbers and their referents increase, extending outwards from the city center in both predictable
and scattershot patterns. No surprise, the mighty Mississippi curbs extensive residential growth
to the west, as if crossing the river were crossing into unfamiliar territory. Instead, the western
bank facilitates industrial growth, the main port of Greater Baton Rouge emerging there and
serving such industries as lumber and oil, the latter voracious in its claim to land along the river
in the mid to later part of the twentieth century. As industry expands, additional railway lines are
laid and, in the 1920s, the main public depot is built on River Road, just across from the (old)
state capitol and a mere block from where Convention Street intersects with River Road. From
the depot then (suitcase in hand, a newly arrived state legislator, river worker, or industry man),
it is but a short walk to Convention Street, up the hill to busy Third, and a few doors down to
58
find 310 Convention and the services of the physician and home owner, one J. R. Fridge, M. D.
Through at least 1916, there were many homes like Dr. Fridge‟s in the downtown area, within
the first five blocks of the Mississippi. By 1923, most have been replaced by banks, churches,
hotels, and other commercial establishments, which suggests an economically vital city center
servicing both a transient population and city residents who (now) live in the neighborhoods to
the near east, such as Spanish Town, Beauregard Town, and the Garden District. Since, in 1923,
Dr. Fridge provides a useful and likely lucrative service, there is good reason why he retained his
residence and office, enduring or perhaps taking pleasure in the burgeoning hubbub of downtown
life.
In the bound Sanborn Maps, the mapmaker tells his story of development and change by
means of yellow tissue paper and white paper overlays – small, often odd cuts of paper glued
directly over the preexisting image of a building and thereby indicating changes to it. Used for
minor alterations, the tissue paper overlays allow one to see traces of a building‟s prior form
beneath. Eliminated buildings or those with extensive alterations are enshrined under a shroud
of white paper. As pertinent to each case, the mapmaker indicates the alteration or replacement
building by drawing it on the overlay, noting details, and tinting it in accordance with the color
“Key.”
As I noted on my first visit to the maps, minor and major alterations have been made to
310 Convention over the years. In subsequent visits (to the little room behind the locked door up
the elevator on the fourth floor of the library downtown – always a journey it seems into the
combs of this archive), a few additional changes to the house and surrounding area are notable.
At some point between 1923 and 1951, the “D” that designated the house as a residential “D”welling
is overlaid with tissue and transformed to an “O” with “-ffices” printed next to it. In
other words, the official function of house shifted from family home to doctor‟s office, although
59
the alterations to the house over the same period of time (e.g., additional porches) suggest it
fulfilled both functions. Perhaps the designation reflects changes in zoning codes in the
downtown area or property laws that require any public access to and use of a building supersede
any private use.
I also became intrigued by the seeming discrepancies between the detailed Sheet 7 and its
“Skeleton Key” or, rather, what was concealed beneath the built-up overlays on the detailed
sheet and quite visible on the “Skeleton Key.” It was as if the mapmaker had grown weary of
making changes to both and, at some point, set the skeleton aside, a barebones remnant of what
had been. In Figure 12, the differences are apparent. In the skeleton, there are four small
buildings in the two lots directly east of 310 and, in the lot to the southeast, is an oddly shaped
building that looks like a skyscraper lying on its side with an arrow pointing west through its
middle. I figure the arrow is a courtyard around which three connected buildings cluster. On the
detailed Sheet 7, this structure is but a trace beneath the white cut-out that indicates the lot is
used for “PARK‟G.”
Figure 12. Skeleton Key and Sheet 7 Details
(Sanborn Map Company, Insurance Maps of Baton Rouge Louisiana, Volume 1 1923-1963)
60
Likewise, the small buildings to the east of 310 become little phantoms beneath the tissue
paper overlays that show the buildings that have replaced them. On the corner is a wooden gas
station, which may have been the actual fueling kiosk for its partner to the west, the long brick
auto repair shop and filling station. On the other hand, the two may have been competitors, the
smaller station surviving because of its prime location on the corner of an intersection.
I am impressed, actually awed, by the hard bound Sanborn Maps due to the labor and
care involved in handcrafting their details. To my digitized eye and hand (which so easily can
copy, crop, enlarge or minimize the maps dis/placing them here for you to see), the handcrafting
amuses me too. In terms of current reproductive technologies, the maps perform their economic
function “inefficiently,” which is not to say they were inefficient as applied in their time. Two
results that I will but mention here are the maps show us – they display – how the act of
representation/remembering is always one that forgets too, and the temperament of their display
is often whimsical. The tissue or white paper overlays demonstrate both results in that replaced
or forgotten buildings often leave traces beneath the updated representations and the updates are
clearly paper cut-outs that admit to their odd shape or slight misfit with the outlines of what they
(do not) replace. In many ways, the overlays remind me of my house with its various alterations
that jut out at odd angles and don‟t quite fit with the lines of the original structure.
DIGITAL COMBS AND HONEY
As I mentioned earlier, the Sanborn Maps for Baton Rouge are archived online by the
LSU library system. The black and white digital reproductions of the hard bound maps are
contained in ten books that date from May 1885 through April 1951. Three-ten Convention
Street is found on Sheet 5 in the 1908, 1911, and 1916 books and, as with the hard bound version
in the public library, on Sheet 7 of Volume 1 in the 1923-1951 book. Due to the digital media or
language structure (the wax comb) in terms of which the maps are transmitted, the (honeyed)
61
knowledge collected there and that I make here is a bit different than that I collected and made in
my interaction with the material maps. A main difference concerns how the digital maps show
the changes made to the buildings and city over time. Since the digital archive holds earlier
books, another key difference is that I am able to gather additional information regarding 310, its
surrounding neighborhood, and Baton Rouge generally.
Until 1923, the Sanborn Maps were updated every three to seven years – i.e., 1885, 1891,
1898, 1903, 1908, 1911, and 1916. Each book contains an index that provides population figures
and, by comparing them, we can get a sense of the city‟s growth over time. Between May 1885
and June 1903, the population increased from 10,000 to 14,000 people. Between June 1903 and
April 1908, it jumped to 18,000 residents and held at that figure through August 1911. The
August 1916 map reports rapid growth again, the population up by 5000 people. By 1923, a
whopping 12,000 additional people had settled in the city, raising the population to 35,000. In a
1923-1947 volume that concentrates on the burgeoning suburbs, the population figure is placed
at 55,000 while the 1923-1951 book reports a figure double that size, 120,000 in 1951. The
soaring increase between 1947 and 1951 reflects urban-suburban growth across the US generally
as WW II veterans return home and settle down to raise their families.
On the 1903 digital map, my house does not exist although the lot is demarcated by the
number 113. On the April 1908 map, it magically appears in the shape of the structure shown
on the “Skeleton Key” in 1923-1951 hard bound map – i.e., without the added front, side, and
back bay window porches (see Figure 10). The house also has a stable out back that bears the
number 310½. (I wonder if the stable was considered a possible residence or a potential site on
which to build another house?) By August 1911, the stable turns into the four buildings I saw
lurking beneath the white overlay on the “Skeleton Key” noted above (see Figure 10). Both the
1923-1947 and 1923-1951 digital maps show that a wood and metal clad garage has replaced the
62
four buildings, although the “Skeleton Key” for the 1923-1947 digital map retains them. This
observation suggests: (a) the auto garage was built sometime between 1923 and 1947; (b) the
mapmaker of the 1923-1947 “skeleton” chose not to indicate the change while the mapmaker of
the 1923-1951 “skeleton” did; and (c) since neither chose to indicate changes to the house, we
might surmise ; (d) the house changes may have been made after 1947; or (e) the “skeletons” are
questionable sources for fixing dates; which (f) confirms making and reading maps are active
practices of language negotiation; which (g) is fun precisely because it is confusing.
Tracking backwards through the books of digital maps, I find an interesting story about
the filling stations that lie to the east of 310 (on lots 316 and 320) as depicted in Figure 11 above.
The 1923-1951 digital book includes pages that show what stood on the lots prior to the
placement of the overlays in the hard bound version. Like the “Skeleton Key” in the hard bound
version (see Figure 11), the digital map indicates that in 1923 a house or “D”-welling stood next
door to 310. The front half of the house was two stories high, the back half one, and there was a
one story building behind it (see Figure 13). The corner lot contains the two buildings shown on
the “Skeleton Key,” one or both demarcated as an “Oil Filling Station.” On the 1916 digital
map, the “D”-welling remains, but the oil station is gone or, rather, it is anticipated by a one
story stable or livery situated in the southeast corner of the lot. (On the Sanborn Maps, stables
and liveries are designated by an “X” marked through the structure). The 1911 digital map
shows the same “D”-welling, but with a larger livery next door (see Figure 13). The livery was
under transfer at the time, and the 1908 digital map shows it as being sold. Both the “D”-welling
and large livery remain intact through to the first digital map of 1885 although the livery
business appears to change hands a number of times (see Figure 14).
63
Figure 13. Assemblage of drawings that show the changes to lots 316 and 320 from the 1911,
1916, and 1923 digital maps ("Digital Sanborn Maps 1867-1970”)
Figure 14. Assemblage of drawings that show the changes in the name of the livery business
from the 1885, 1891, 1898, 1903, 1908, and 1911 digital maps ("Digital Sanborn Maps 1867-
1970”)
On the Sanborn Maps, the above-noted story recurs throughout the downtown area over
the years. Liveries give way to service stations, which frequently give way to parking lots as is
the case currently with the two lots next door to 310. Generally, the story sustains and confirms
the importance of individual transport and mobility in US society and culture. It also tells the
familiar story of residential and commercial blight in urban centers as services, such as gas
stations and auto repair shops, follow the “flight” of residents to outlying neighborhoods and
suburbs from the 1950s on. Once commercially diverse, city centers such as that of Baton Rouge
now service daily commuters with park-n-pay lots and places to eat lunch. Should downtown
redevelopment efforts prove successful, such services as auto repair shops (beauty salons and
barber shops, clothing, book, and hardware stores, a florist, cinema, and toy shop) may find a
lucrative niche in the area again.
64
The digital maps tell a number of additional stories about the buildings in the immediate
neighborhood of 310. On the 1885 digital map, there is a private “D”-welling located just south
of the large livery noted above, “Sam‟l Harbour‟s Livery” to be exact. By 1916, the home has
been replaced by the Wickliffe Apartments, which boast three stories, a central courtyard, and a
passageway that runs from the courtyard to the west side of the building (see Figure 15). Of
course, the apartments are none other than the “oddly shaped . . . skyscraper” I found hidden
beneath the “PARK‟G” lot on the 1923-1951 hard bound map (see Figure 12). The 1923-1951
digital map reveals that the Wickliffe did not disappear beneath the white overlay of “PARK‟G”
until sometime between 1951 and 1960, which once again correlates to the post WW II decline
of urban centers as many residents take to suburban life.

 
Figure 15. Assemblage of drawings that show the changes to the lots southeast of 310
Convention from the 1885, 1898, 1916, and 1923-1947 digital maps ("Digital Sanborn Maps
1867-1970”)
The lots to the south of “PARK‟G” tell a little different story (see Figure 15). In 1885,
there appear to be two private homes, which by 1898 are replaced by a two story post office and
government building. Between 1923 and 1947, a large, decoratively tiled City Hall is built, the
Wickliffe Apartments situated just next door. Unlike the Wickliffe, the building that housed City
65
Hall remains today, its architecture of municipal austerity and ornamentation serving the needs
of a private social club.
Figure 16. Pike’s Hall Transformations from the 1885, 1903, 1908, 1911, 1916, 1923, and 1923-
1951 digital maps ("Digital Sanborn Maps 1867-1970”)
Another interesting story concerns Pike‟s Hall, a theater owned by the wealthy
entrepreneur and president of the New Orleans and Baton Rouge Railroad, William Pike, who
also owned the lot for 310 Convention before J. R. Fridge obtained it. The theater was located
about a block from 310, up on Third Street and between Convention and Florida Streets. On the
1885 map, there is a note appended to the drawing of the building that states, “theater seldom
used.” The observation seems to anticipate the 1903 replacement of the theatre by a funeral
home and, also, a bank office with lodging on the upper floors. By 1908, lighter spirits prevail as
the undertaker‟s has become a billiard hall, which by 1911 includes a small barber shop tucked
into one of its corners. Apparently, the barber shop did well. By 1916, it along with a restaurant
and small bank office have replaced the pool room – although, within a few short years (by
66
1923), a bakery has taken over the whole of the first floor. At some point between 1923 and
1951, the bakery becomes a restaurant with a hotel on the second and third floors. This final
note prompts me to re-curve and view the maps again whereby I discover that upper rooms were
available to let for a good part of the building‟s history. I find pleasure in this observation since,
hypothetically, a person such as myself might have lived there for twenty or thirty years and led
a rich, sensuous life; an odiferous life, propped up in bed with a good book as the pungent smells
of flowers and formaldehyde, beer, soap, and hair tonic, fried catfish and freshly baked bread fill
my room on the second floor. The maps tell me stories of buildings, buildings made and used by
people ever adapting to the shifting circumstances of time and place and bodies in motion.
A MODEL OF THE ARCHIVE
In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Derrida writes,
The archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not
only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which
would exist in any case, as such, without the archive, one still believes it was or will have
been. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure
of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and its relationship to the
future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. (16-17; emphases in
original)
As archives, the Sanborn Maps are neither neutral nor static representations of the city and
buildings they record in their hard bound and digital forms. In literal as well as figurative ways,
the maps perform an accumulation of memories that operate within, upon, and against each
other: barber, billiard room, bakery. Thereby, they show the archive in action, simultaneously
collecting and generating the knowledge it produces; the stories it tells about a house,
neighborhood, and city. Like a hive, the generation of knowledge (honey) is determined by and
dependent on the structure (the wax comb) in which it is stored and through which it is made
manifest, restored or performed in material ways for others. In Derrida‟s terms, the “technical
structure” of the Sanborn Maps “determines the structure of the archivable content.” So it
67
follows, the differences between hand drawn and digital technologies affect content, experience,
and meaning making too. As Derrida argues, “what is no longer archived in the same way is no
longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the
structure that archives” (Archive Fever 18).
Understanding that the digital maps are black and white reproductions of the hand drawn
maps, both versions attempt to imitate with precision and accuracy the basic lines and shapes of
the buildings and the city that contains them. In other words, the technologies of material
architecture and city planning (e.g., the composition of buildings on lots, in relation to each other
in blocks and to the grid of streets that enables mobility between them) “codetermine” the
structure of the maps. The city and buildings are a living archive too. With the aim of efficiency
and functionality, the imitative maps reduce the scale of the referents and their life over “real”
time, condensing the latter into summaries of three or more years. In this way, the maps are
structured in terms of a metonymic language of efficient communication that retains direct
associations between signifier and signified (e.g., “D”-welling; “PARK‟G” lot; “A”uto garage).
The maps speak an economical language directed, initially, to meet the economic function of
insurer liability. However, due to the differences between the signifier and signified (a
technological glitch, some might say), gaps emerge in the flow of efficient and precise
information. While an insurer might overlook most of these gaps, others such as I find the gaps
to be sites where additional experiences and meanings emerge. For one, the very use of
metonymic language marks its partiality and incompleteness as epitomized by the “Skeleton
Keys.” One wonders what has been left out or forgotten in the name of bare bone efficiency.
The question gives rise to associative memories, experiences, and meanings that, in a sense,
restore flesh to the bare bone structure: the blacksmith “Sam Harbour” shoes horses on the “earth
floor” of his “livery”; a lodger leaves his “R‟ms” to grab a quick shave at the “Barber” before
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taking dinner at the “Restrt” next door; a doctor levels four buildings out back to erect a metal
clad “A” garage. Importantly, this excess of experience and meaning is born by rather than
opposed to the structure that attempts to contain it. It is an alternative or, as Victor Turner would
have it, an anti-structure of excess that, in this case, insists that structures of economy are
codependent with structures of bodies – i.e., people, who build and inhabit buildings as well as
those who record their stories in the maps they make.
As I implied earlier, the particular structure of the hard bound, hand crafted maps insists
on the interplay of economy and excess in fairly overt ways. The tissue and white paper overlays
call attention to the act of remembering as one that also forgets. Further, the hand drawn, tinted,
titled, cut-and-paste technology of making the maps is evident and, to our digitized sensibility, it
appears an odd way to realize efficiency. We are made aware of the map maker and the seeming
excess of physical labor involved in creating the maps. The maps defamiliarize the structures of
economy and excess and to the point where I, at least, experience the maps as art; as an artful
project about economy and excess that, in our time and place, offers a prime example of poststructural
historiography, philosophy, textuality, and performance. That is to say, the form and
function of the maps are unfamiliar enough to us today that their operations stand out as
“strange,” confirming that structures are neither neutral nor static, but alter in light of changing
circumstances and our perceptions regarding them.
The technological structure of the digital maps operates a little differently. For one, the
maps lack color and, hence, no longer enable a quick read of the buildings in terms of insurer
liability. Their reproduction in black and white drains them of this function. Second, instead of
overlays, the digital maps show changes in a building by the complete replacement of an old
drawing by a new one, the latter erasing all traces of the prior building and its function. Rather
than an accumulation of layers that indicate a past, the digital maps operate more as a montage,
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each map existing in its own space and time without reference to a past. In this way, the maps
are easy to read and, as such, we might say they substitute the economy of presence for the
economy of (insurer) risk. Excess comes into play as the researcher flips between the individual
maps so as to gain an understanding of the building‟s story. So too, there are more maps in more
books and hence more and older stories to collect than is the case with the hard bound archive.
Lastly, the maps‟ digital composition and explicit reproductive aesthetic invite me to copy, crop,
cut-n-paste with ease and little guilt as compared to my furtive experience taking photographs
(ever so carefully) of the hand crafted maps. The result is reproductive excess with a difference,
as I hope is demonstrated by my assemblages in Figures 13-16. In Brecht‟s and Benjamin‟s
terms, then, the digital maps democratize access to and re-use of the maps and, more broadly, art
and culture making. The risk of such democratization, of course, is that in free access to the
imagery, the re-use is elided and the past erased in favor of the currency of new and present
ownership.
So, while the hand crafted maps structure economy and excess so as to make me highly
aware of the politics of representation (of remembering and forgetting), the digital maps
encourage me to give it a try anyway. Together, they ask me to acknowledge what I have been
doing all along; namely, by interacting with the archives I have been collecting and composing
an archive of my own – i.e., codetermined by the language structures of the hand crafted and
digital maps. This chapter is an expression of that interaction and it is prefigured by my making
another archive in three-dimensional form: a miniature model of 310 that shows my
understanding of how the maps (and I) perform the house.
The last available outline of 310 in the 1923-1951 digital “book” provides a ground plan
for the model, which I copy and enlarge so as to fill an 11” x17” piece of white foam board. The
result is a 50‟ to 1” scale ground plan of the actual house. Coupled with photographs of 310, the
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ground plan determines the length and angle of the walls and their relationship to each other. As
noted on the maps, most of the walls run two stories high. I cut the walls from white foam board
and, based on map details and photographs, also cut out windows and doors. Then I glue the
walls together. It takes some effort. Like the maps, my performance to this point attempts to
imitate, in reduced scale, the current house as accurately and precisely as possible.
To include changes made to the house over time, I integrate the lines of the squared off
porch into the design of the back bay window porch that replaced it sometime between 1951 and
1963. I also construct and attach two- rather than three-dimensional porches to the front and side
of the house so as to highlight rather than elide the changes to the house and my act of restoring
them. Like the overlays on the hard bound map, the odd two-dimensional porches call attention
to their artificial misfit with the rest of the model. For like reasons, I craft a flat rather than
three-dimensional roof on which I draw a web of triangles that quite accurately mis/represents
the multifarious angles and pitches of the roofline. The roof is removable although there is
nothing to see inside except empty space . . . unless you happen to see the globs of glue along the
seam lines, evidence of the backstage labor involved in building the house.
With the white foam board structure (of metonymic economy and some excess) in place,
I copy, enlarge, and cut out bits of information from the various digital books, such as notations
of structural and architectural details. I also copy and cut out my correspondence with others
regarding 310. While my requests for concrete information bore little fruit, the replies show
interest in and support for my research, as if the writers have experienced an important dwelling
in their lives too. I paper the outside of my miniature house with the black and white paper cut
outs, aiming to perform like the archives in a number of ways, such as: the layered accumulation
of tissue and white paper memories in the hard bound maps; the invocation of metonymic
economy and associative excess; and the explicit use of (black and white) reproduced copies that
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acknowledge their draw on and also misfit with a prior referent. I also strive to make a model
that celebrates my hand (in the) crafting of cultural history and, thereby, support our mutual right
and responsibility to do the same with confidence and also respect to those whose prior
performances enable our own.
Figure 17. A Model Hive April 2008 (photo by author)
Like all archives, my model is a beehive consisting of wax comb structures that house
and give rise to honeyed knowledge that inevitably exceeds and changes those structures. Like
all archives, my model also is a metonymic miniature of the cultural history it collects and
composes; a miniature house that helps me express how the maps and I perform. According to
Lévi-Strauss,
Miniatures . . . are “manmade” and, what is more, made by hand. They are therefore not
just projections or passive homologues of the object: they constitute a real experiment
with it. Now the model being an artifact, it is possible to understand how it is made and
this understanding of the method of construction adds a supplementary dimension. . . .
[The supplement suggests] there are several solutions to the same problem. The choice
of one solution involves a modification of the result to which another solution would
have led, and the observer is in effect presented with the general picture of these
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permutations at the same time as the particular solution offered. He is thereby
transformed into an active participant without even being aware of it. (24)
In the upcoming chapter, “Doll House,” I examine the miniature more fully, but call on it here to
ruminate briefly on if and how the “method of construction” (i.e., constructing miniatures of a
house and city in model and map) “adds a supplementary dimension” that transforms the
“observer . . . into an active participant.” As I tried to express in my writing of this chapter, my
interaction with the maps entwined the pleasures of discovering facts about 310, its
neighborhood and city, with discovering gaps or, as Derrida would have it, “spacing” in the facts
that I could either engage as an activate participant or ignore. That is, while the metonymic
miniaturization of material reality boasts an economy of expression that implies things left out, I
am not sure the noted implications are always pursued by the observer. The transformation of
observer to active participant does not just happen or, if it does, we are not always “aware of it”
and, hence, aware of the significance and ramifications of our participation. As Vera Zolberg
offers, “reflexivity makes life hard” (ix), and it makes life hard precisely because it excites
participation that is not active, in conventional terms anyway – i.e., in terms that privilege the
spontaneity of the I/eye in his or her present tense. Of course, in these terms, transformation
from observer to active participant happens all the time.
The question, then, is how to stimulate participation in a miniature map, model,
performance, and/as archive that embraces reflexivity; that embraces a transformation that makes
life difficult or shows life to be difficult more so than easy. I will not presume to answer the
question here as much as pursue a few permutations.
When placed in conversation with the archive as an event of collecting and composing
simultaneously, the question places as much stress on collecting as on composing so that the
latter is constantly questioned by the collection. When I first visited the Sanborn Maps, my aim
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was to find my house, 310 Convention, in the archive of maps. As I recall, “I turn to Sheet 7”
and “from an overhead view . . . scan the page quickly in search of 310. My eyes circle, narrow
in, then land to dwell on my house.” At the time and in my narrative, I was transformed (no
doubt about it) by my active participation with a single house on a single map. I collected and
composed the house as easily and efficiently as, say, an insurer who in search of the same house
on the same map finds, collects, and composes it as a high risk liability because it is tinted
yellow. She closes the book. The house disappears. The performance is over precisely because
the collection and composition of the house abides by the economics of (her) presence. As I
discovered, however, once I engaged multiple maps, an accumulation of maps, maps within and
upon and against other maps, my composing process slowed down considerably and often came
to a grinding halt due to the substantive excess of the archive, which includes its resistant gaps
and contradictions.
In his concepts of place and space, Michel de Certeau offers another permutation of the
noted question. Like my initial grasp of 310 or the composition and use of the digital maps as
separate entities, “place” for de Certeau occurs when “the elements taken into consideration are
beside one another, each situated in its own „proper‟ and distinct location, a location it defines”
and that “implies an indication of stability” (117). “Space,” on the other hand, “occurs as the
effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a
polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.” Space is “the act of a
present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts” (117).
In the Sanborn Maps, space arises in the accrual of tissue and white paper overlays whose
attempt to economize – to place value and meaning on top – is countered by the excess beneath.
Similarly, in the digital maps, the collection and composition of the single maps in relation to
each other (e.g., billiard room, barber, bakery, restaurant) indicate a polyvalent space of shifting
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claims to place. Notably, while I found the transformations of Pike‟s Hall pleasurable (in
odiferous terms) I suspect the pool hall owner, barber, and baker did not. For them, the
transformation of place into space made life difficult. And I am able to participate in this
understanding only by means of a healthy collection, and a reflexive composition process that
makes life difficult for me too since my sensuous experience of the archive is countered by my
collection.
In this chapter, I engaged the archives of the Sanborn maps as nectar for collecting and
composing another hive of research concerning 310 Convention and its environs. In the process,
I discovered my role as a worker bee requires me to value collecting as a way to double check
what I compose from the honeyed knowledge, be it sustenance in thought or the structure of my
arguments. I found I must spend time dwelling on what I gathered, take interpretive care as well
as risks in how I distilled the collection, and transform my choices into forms that “give back” to
the maps and the individuals and communities they represent. As Derrida urges, the product of
archival reproduction should “illuminate, read, interpret, establish its object, namely a given
inheritance, by inscribing itself into it, that is to say by opening it and by enriching it enough to
have a rightful place in it” (Archive Fever 67). Bees enact this notion of inheritance and
enrichment in their commitment to their colony‟s well being and in their symbiotic relationship
with plants. I hope my archival efforts operate similarly, sustaining and activating the
communities connected with my research and the house that drew to me to them.
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CHAPTER FOUR
DOLL HOUSE
I was never really into dolls much, although I did have a Fisher-Price Little People house
when I was young. I liked that I could carry around the house with me, aided by the convenient
handle that also worked as a hinge to keep the house closed. I also liked that all the little people
and their accessories fit neatly inside the house for such adventures. I appreciated the
lithographs that decorated the walls and floors and landscaping of the self-contained dwelling,
and the little plastic pieces (the chairs, tables, beds, and car) suited my imagination just fine.
Since I also had a Little People barn with animals, a Little People school and bus, and a Little
People plane, the domestic site of Little People life was a sub-scene in a larger adventure. When
I imagined and played out stories of family life, I don‟t recall (re)furnishing the house as much as
using an assortment of Little People pieces to create new and different spaces in which the
stories could unfold. Similar story spaces and places were created with my Lincoln Logs, Tinker
Toys, and Lego pieces, base materials that could be taken apart and reassembled (often in hybrid
combinations) easily. Even though I may not have been a girl who played with dolls in the
traditional sense, I was a girl who enjoyed creating stories that allowed me to get inside the
miniature worlds of my toy box and imagination.
I appreciate the desire of the dollhouse as a place for collecting miniatures and as a swell
curio cabinet in which to store the collection. According to Flora Gill Jacobs in A History of
Doll Houses, miniature containers and their contents were leisure class symbols of status dating
from early Egyptian funerary pieces made to accompany the dead in the afterlife to fifteenth and
sixteenth century curios or cabinet houses. From the adult desire to collect, design, and decorate
a perfect world evolved the cheaper, sturdier versions for child‟s play. For me, some of the more
interesting dollhouses are those where the makers have attended to the meticulous details of
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architecture and décor so as to highlight a certain lifestyle and imaginary. Queen Mary‟s
Dollhouse of 1924 includes “a vast number of objects created expressly for it,” such as
“drawerfuls of prints and original watercolors by famous artists” and “two hundred books written
by celebrated authors in their own handwriting” (Jacobs 260). The Castle of actress Colleen
Moore represents a fantasy dwelling or, rather, it is a dwelling on fantasy. In architecture and
décor, each room pays tribute to a fable or fairytale, its story line and characters.
The degree of detail in miniature constructions is all the more impressive, even
staggering, when viewers consider the amount of thought, time, and labor such constructs
require. As Lévi-Strauss observes, due to its scale, the miniature highlights the effort of the
creative act, prompting the viewer to recognize what the creator chose to retain, alter, and delete
in the process of miniaturization. In turn, the miniature recalls the larger referent, encouraging
the viewer to recognize and review places and items she may overlook in everyday life. In The
Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard considers the miniaturist‟s efforts in terms of her disposition
toward the world and the reasons she concentrates on the details.
All small things must evolve slowly, and certainly a long period of leisure, in a quiet
room, was needed to miniaturize the world. Also, one must love space to describe it as
minutely as though there were world molecules, to enclose an entire spectacle in a
molecule of drawing, in this feat there is an important dialectics of the intuition – which
always sees big – and work, which is hostile to flights of fancy. Intuitionists, in fact, take
in everything at one glance, while details reveal themselves and patiently take their
places, one after the other, with the discursive impishness of the clever miniaturist. It is
as though the miniaturist challenged the intuitionist philosopher‟s lazy contemplation, as
though he said to him: “You would not have seen that! Take the time needed to see all
these little things that cannot be seen all together.” In looking at a miniature, unflagging
attention is required to integrate all the detail. (159)
As a way of viewing and making culture, the miniaturist turns aside from the much-vaunted
overview, which “always sees big” and aims for significance – i.e., what‟s the broader point of
seeing small? For the miniaturist, the broad patterns of cultural history and their significance are
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realized in the details, which require desire (love) on the part of the researcher in order to take
the time to see and study them.
Jacobs is of this disposition when she writes that in addition to being a collector‟s item, a
container for collections, a work of art, and a child‟s plaything, a dollhouse functions as a site of
cultural history:
[An] historian, with words, attempts to tell us a great deal about customs and tastes. A
painter, with brush, lets us know even more, recording perhaps, and simply, the corner of
a kitchen with the cook roasting a goose. But the dolls‟ house reveals, at a glance, what
has taken the writer many chapters and the artist much canvas to say. . . . Time stands still
and a period is preserved as it never can be in a full-sized house. All sorts of things,
however ephemeral, are left as they were in a dolls‟ house that would never remain in a
human‟s. (4-5)
While I am not sure time stands still in a doll house, as Jacobs suggests, it does slow down since,
like descriptive accounts in narrative and painting, the details of an item are focused on closely.
In On Longing, Susan Stewart confirms that “the details of a miniature magnify the importance
of what we experience and express . . . : [t]he procedure by which description multiplies in detail
is analogous to and mimetic of the process whereby space becomes significance, whereby
everything is made to „count‟” (47). For Stewart, this magnification reveals “a secret life . . . a
set of actions and hence a narrativity and history outside the given field of perception” (54). The
“given field” in this case is the perceptual norm that action occurs in everyday scenic time and
place. In US culture especially, another “given field” is summary time and place where action
(narrative and history) are sped up so as enable the efficient production and consumption of an
action, item, story, or image and, hence, facilitate the broad overview and aim of progress. So,
while the miniature, and the dollhouse especially, may “present . . . a constant daydream” of
domestication and class consumption (Stewart 54), it simultaneously critiques how domestication
and class consumption are enacted (differently) in the “given fields” of experience and
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expression. That is to say, the miniature is not the sole performer of these ideological practices,
although it may indeed magnify them, urge us to slow down and take account of them.
Embedded in the descriptive poetics of the miniature, then, is the political potential to
make meaning of “the ongoing business of quotidian life” (Turner 75); the scenic and summary
fields of experience and expression. In From Ritual to Theatre, Victor Turner calls on Wilhelm
Dilthey to observe that making “value . . . inheres in the affective enjoyment of the present” and
“the power and faculty of using the will . . . refers to the future” while “meaning . . . arises in
memory, in cognition of the past, and is concerned with negotiation about the „fit‟ between past
and present” (75; emphases in original). In the conservative impulse to spare and preserve the
stuff of everyday life by slowing down time so as to focus on it – dwell on it in Heidegger‟s
terms – the miniature demonstrates its ability to make meaning of assumed values and our will to
power. In a sense, this is the job assigned the miniature, which is not to say it always succeeds in
fulfilling it.
My draw on Turner in the above paragraph implies that there is a connection between the
poetics and politics of the miniature and performance. Like the miniature, performance has been
or is defined as an act of imitation, reiteration, a stylized act of repetition, or restored behavior.
Performance recalls a prior referent. Also like the miniature, many performances result in if not
aim to represent a microcosm of quotidian life so as to magnify certain material aspects, values,
and motives; to make them count and urge the audience to take account of them. One type of
performance pertinent to my house and to my dollhouse concerns in this chapter is the
performance practice of installation.
In her introduction to Space, Site, Intervention, Susan Suderburg traces the concepts and
practices of installations to the seventeenth and eighteenth century collecting practices of the
Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities and wonders:
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Wunderkammern were composed of collections of items chosen not because of their
historical value as antiquities or their monetary worth but because the collectors found
the objects pleasing and demonstrative of the “wonders of the world,” whether natural,
spiritual, or man-made. . . . This lack of homogeneity is precisely what makes the
Wunderkammer such an intriguing precursor to installation art. It suggests as well a
connectivity to acts of intimate material collection and repositioning such as curio or
souvenir cabinets, personal altars, roadside and hiking memorials, and autobiographical
mantelpiece groupings, all of which take the institutional scale of the Wunderkammer
and dissolve and redistribute this passion for knowledge through the consumption and
arrangement of objects on a more intimate scale across the everyday. (7-8; emphases in
original)
The “intimate scale” of installations and miniatures refers not only to size, but to the collector‟s
active selection of and engagement with the objects she has chosen or made and the stories they
tell (or spark in the viewer) by means of their composition. Like miniatures, installations draw
on the phenomena of actual life to create fictive worlds that become real – fictive real – in their
material manifestation. In this way, the installation like the miniature “multiplies significance”;
it inspires multiple acts of meaning-making “by virtue of the tension it creates between inside
and outside, container and contained, surface and depth” (Stewart 41).
In this chapter, I continue to inhabit 310 Convention through the perspectives of the
dollhouse as miniature and as installation, inspired by my “fictive real” performances of the
same. As I described in Chapter Three, I made a three-dimensional model of 310, a wax house,
in order to better understand the archive activated in the Sanborn Maps. In this chapter, I reconceive
my model as a dollhouse, a miniature dwelling, in light of my placement of it within
another miniature dwelling, an installation about abandoned places that I and others performed
for the public. Our collective installation served as the 2003 program for Across Disciplines:
Performance Research and Response, an annual event sponsored by the Performance Studies
area in the Department of Communication Studies at LSU. Across Disciplines features the
performance research of graduate students to which faculty from diverse departments and
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disciplines respond. Below, I discuss Across Disciplines as a model for performance research
and describe our specific program, paying particular attention to my little dwelling within the
installation as a whole. I analyze my dollhouse site and, progressively the entire performance, by
calling on Heidegger‟s notion of preservation and Derrida‟s “archive fever.” I then move to the
significance of the miniature as installation and performance in terms of issues of absence and
presence, recalling concerns I discussed in my introduction to the chapter. Lastly, I extend
Bachelard‟s interest in the motivation behind miniatures to his concept of topophilia or
“felicitous spaces” – i.e., those spaces we love and, as necessary, defend against adversarial
forces.
A PLACE TO PLAY
Across Disciplines: Performance Research and Response is an annual event initiated by
the Performance Studies faculty in the fall of 2000. The aim of the program is to feature the
performance research of graduate students in and through live performance and, thereby, insist
that performance is both a subject and method of study. Typically, the program is organized
around a central theme or theoretical issue of research and, typically, it runs for two nights in the
department‟s performance facility, the HopKins Black Box. Each night, three to four invited
respondents – faculty and other professionals from various departments and often other
institutions – provide feedback and discuss the pieces with the audience. Rather than impose a
“performance” perspective, the diverse respondents are encouraged to address the research from
their base of interest, which then expresses another aim of the program; namely, to understand
and activate the study of performance as explicitly cross-disciplinary.
The performances for the first event were conceived in various classes, but finalized in a
Problems in Performance and Criticism seminar taught by Dr. Ruth Laurion Bowman in the
spring of 2000. The four graduate students who presented their work experimented with various
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research methods, including performance ethnography, historiography, and performative writing.
According to Ruth Bowman, the idea for the program emerged in the cross-feed between her
course and the first Performative Writing seminar, also taught in spring 2000 by Dr. Michael
Bowman. Having sat in on the course, Ruth found,
. . . by experimenting with diverse writing models or relays, the course helped us discover
different ways of crafting subjectivity; models that resulted in something that seemed to
us more like “performance” on the page than did the results of other models we‟d been
taught to use – i.e., for writing research. We found we could acknowledge our subjective
position (as we‟d been charged to do) through the play of different voices and
perspectives; doubling, tripling, quadrupling “the self” by ciphering it through socialcultural
forms of writing and other expressive media. So, in these terms anyway, it seems
the performative writing seminar  Across Disciplines program was and is an attempt to
position ourselves not only in terms of the politics of writing/research in the academy, but
identity politics as they have and continue to play out in performance studies and other
disciplines. (R. Bowman)
As a student taking the writing seminar, my experience was similar to that expressed by Ruth. In
addition, I found that the experience helped me move between the theories and practices of the
page and stage more easily, understanding myself as a performer of research in both text and
(corporeal) body.
For the spring 2003 Across Disciplines, I petitioned for and was selected to produce the
program. The research emphasis and theme of the program derived from a Poetics of Place
seminar taught in the fall of 2002 by Dr. Miles Richardson in the Department of Geography and
Anthropology. I asked three of my seminar classmates if, along with me, they would like to reconceive
the research they had done for the course in terms of a performance installation, which
we would stage for the public the following semester. All agreed to do the project although
none were performance studies/communication studies students. As the producer and director of
the event, I was responsible for designing and implementing the rehearsal process, purchasing
the necessary materials for the installation(s), staffing and publicizing the show, and arranging
for the respondents. The show ran two nights, April 9 and April 10, 2003 in the HopKins Black
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Box. On the first night, three respondents offered feedback. They were Dr. Bainard Cowan
from the Department of English, Dr. Jay D. Edwards from the Department of Geography and
Anthropology, and Dr. Joshua Gunn from the Department of Communication Studies. Three
different respondents provided insights on the second night. They were Marsha R. Cuddeback,
AIA certified architect and Instructor in the School of Architecture, Dr. Marchita B. Mauck,
Associate Dean of the College of Art & Design, and Dr. Miles E. Richardson from the
Department of Geography and Anthropology.
As noted above, the program was based on Dr. Richardson‟s seminar, Poetics of Place,
which in the fall of 2002 emphasized places that evoke a sense of the past. In addition to reading
and discussing materials by cultural geographers and anthropologists, course activities included
field trips to historic and other sites in Baton Rouge, poetic responses to the readings, and
listening to and understanding the song lyrics of such as artists as Lucinda Williams in poetic
terms. For my research project in the course, I focused on “Big House 310: Building, Dwelling,
and Inhabiting Desires” – tracing the multiple stories I discovered in researching (what at the
time I understood was) an “abandoned” Victorian town house.
For Across Disciplines, I retained my concentration on abandoned places and selected
three classmates whose research was similar to my own in this way. In “Rituals of Truth at the
Picture Show,” Barbara Faulkner, a doctoral student in Education Curriculum and Instruction,
documented the shifting screen of graffiti images applied to the exterior walls of the defunct
University Cinema that (once) stood near campus. Jacqueline Mills, a master student in Cultural
Geography, created a phantom image of a break tree in “Shadows and Whispers Beneath the
Break Tree.” Once used for shade by slaves and tenant farmers, the large oak tree stands as a
relic of the plantation past on a contemporary Mississippi cotton farm. In his piece, “Le Petit
Versailles: A Garden Overgrown with Memory,” John Welch, a doctoral student in Cultural
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Geography, explored the traces of the past that remain in an overgrown garden on a southern
Louisiana plantation. Along with my house, all four places were no longer occupied according
to their former uses and we found we were preoccupied with how the spaces had adapted to and
survived their various states of abandonment.
To activate further the cross-feed between disciplines and help my classmates make the
shift from page to stage, I paired each participant with a graduate student in performance studies.
Understood as guides, Melanie Kitchens, Gary Reeves, and Gretchen Stein Rhodes worked with
the non-performance majors to conceptualize their research in terms of performance and
performance installations and to find practical ways to realize the connections they had made. In
return, the performance studies students were guided by their partners and their expertise as
regards the places they had researched. All in all, we were “tour guides” of various sorts,
enacting theoria as Michael Bowman articulates it in his call for “better tourism.”
[Theoria] of course is the etymological root of our words theory and theater. The
practice of theoria involved travel to foreign places, to oracles, to sites where strange or
marvelous objects, people, or activities were rumored to be. The theoros would venture
to such places in order to see what could be seen, to get the lay of the land, to investigate
the rumors, and so forth, and he would return home and appear before the public to give
an account of his travels. Tourism, theory, and theater come together in the ancient
practice of theoria, considered as a mode of creative research that relies on performance
as its method. (“Looking for Stonewall‟s Arm” 105; emphases in original)
By means of their field work and archival research, and by traveling into the “foreign” territory
of performance, my three classmates had ventured forth “to get the lay of the land.” So too, the
performance studies students had entered the unknown fields of their partner‟s discipline and
specific site of research. Together, we installed our accumulated knowledge in the HopKins
Black Box so as to “appear before the public to give an account of [our] . . . travels.” Thereby,
we asked the audience to travel in theoria too.
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PLAYING SPACES
Through the shared theoretical lens of abandoned places that perform a sense of the past,
we created a new space – a microcosm of our individual and collective research – in the
HopKins Black Box, which is itself a microcosm of experimental performance in the academy.
On the nights of the performance, the audience entered the space through the main door
on the south side of the room. Immediately to their left was a large scaffold that contained my
mini-installation for 310 Convention.1
The audience entered the scaffold through the opening
that faced them and exited on the opposite side. A series of wooden disks representing a
cobblestone path led them around to the north face of the scaffold where they could sit and view
a slideshow of the house projected on a white sheet. In the center of the space, north of the
scaffold or straight ahead as the audience entered the room, was John‟s mini-installation. It
consisted of four (4‟ X 8‟) flats arranged in a pentagon with one open face on the western side.
The flats were topped with heavy burlap, branches, and greenery. With flashlights in hand, the
audience entered and exited through the single opening in order to discover what lay within. In
the northwest corner of the room was Jacqueline‟s mini-installation, a giant black paper tree lit
from below and surrounded by cotton balls. The audience had to maneuver around the tree and
through the cotton balls to see the images that were projected on the north and west walls.
Barbara‟s mini-installation extended almost the full length along the eastern wall. Her
arrangement of platforms, flats, and pieces of building materials from the defunct cinema
positioned the audience in direct relationship to the wall, which was covered with white paper.
Armed with markers and crayons, the audience was encouraged to create their own graffiti on the
white papered wall.
1
Mini-installation refers to each performer‟s piece. Installation refers to the collective project.
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To start, audience members tended to investigate the space by beginning with Barbara‟s
or my piece and moving in a counterclockwise or clockwise direction respectively, ending with
John‟s piece in the center of the room. As the space filled with audience members, travel
variations occurred. The audience explored the installation for about forty-five minutes and,
after a short break, the respondents offered their feedback. Discussion among the audience,
performers, and respondents followed.
Below, I discuss each piece more fully, concentrating on my mini-installation and the
event as a whole. As the research projects progressed from the page to the stage and now to the
page again, the theme of abandonment was supplemented by the interaction of bodies (our own
and those of the audience) with the installation(s) that represented places of abandonment. In
other words, in and through performance, the represented places were not abandoned. This
understanding of différance (between the actual and fictive real) guides me as I process my
research on the page, resulting in a re-conceptualization of each piece and the installation as a
whole in terms of the miniature.
Barbara Faulkner investigated the shifting picture show of graffiti that had taken over the
exterior of a defunct movie theater. I visited the theater when I toured LSU during my senior
year of high school. I and some newfound friends saw the movie Brazil there, which in light of
this project seems somewhat uncanny. Brazil‟s emphasis on the imagination as a way to resist
and contest ideological practices we find errant or oppressive speaks to a similar activation and
function of the imagination in our installation(s). We used our imaginations to create fictive real
spaces of sensory and cognitive engagement for places that had been relegated to the periphery
of the contemporary landscape – i.e., abandoned. In subject and method, Barbara‟s piece placed
explicit stress on this/the activation and political functioning of the imagination.
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Shut down in the early 1990s, the theatre was inherited by a female artist who allowed
graffiti artists to mark or “tag” the space as their own. Abandoned as a site for the showing of
commercial films (i.e., the reproduction of mass culture), the empty building became a site for
the ever-shifting display of alternative art by a fringe culture. In her miniature representation of
the site, Barbara prompted audience members to use their imaginations to “tag” the wall of the
Black Box. The differance between expressive cultures was indicated I think by the tensive
differences “between inside and outside” (Stewart 41); between the relative safety and ease of
marking a white papered wall inside a performance space and the danger, the illegality, of
tagging the outside of a building at night – which of course is another kind of performance, a
microcosmic representation of a culture(s) and its values.
Just prior to the Across Disciplines program, the cinema was torn down. To mark the
loss, Barbara collected graffiti rubble from the site and integrated it into her piece along with her
collection of photographic images and filmed interviews with some of the artists. In this way,
her miniature became a memorial to the building as a site for an alternative art practice and the
culture of artists who do it. The activity of taggingmarking the walls in the Black Box
multiplies in significance too since it might be understood as an act of remembrance; the
restoration, preservation, and positive evaluation of an alternative art form; the perverse imitation
of the same; and Barbara willing the continuance of resistant art into the future through the
audience‟s rehearsal of it. Through the miniaturization and magnification of the activity,
Barbara‟s piece helps me focus on and take account of it here. The miniature does its job. I can
only speculate as to whether, in the heat of marking the walls/performing graffiti, the audience
experienced their own “cognition of the past” (Turner 75), aware of the differences between the
miniature and its referents.
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John Welsh explored the once formal gardens of Petit Versailles Plantation in Saint
James Parish, Louisiana. In the mid 1800‟s, the plantation was owned by Valcour Aime, one of
the wealthiest sugar planters in the country who made his fortune by developing a successful
sugar refining process. The lavish compound he built for himself and his family included acres
of formal gardens tended by gardeners from the “original” Versailles, located just south of Paris.
There also were greenhouses where the gardeners nurtured nonnative plants and crops. Aime‟s
desire to control and contain the nature that surrounded him and contributed to his wealth came
to an end when he lost his only son, his wife, and a daughter within a few years. Aime went into
exile and stopped caring for the land, and it reverted back to its former state. His palatial home
burned to the ground years later. All that remains of the former compound are some stone
features of the gardens and a few exotic plants that managed to survive amid the local flora.
In the exterior and interior of his miniature, John imitated the tightly tangled space of
dripping moss, wet leaves, tree branches, and hanging vines he found when he visited Petit
Versailles, once a miniature in itself. With the aid of flashlights, the audience found their way
into the dark interior space where bits of text and image hung amidst the overgrowth. The
materials documented the “culture” and “cultivation” of Petit Versailles in its heyday,
articulating what the estate (as miniature) had attempted to replicate and contain within its tidy
boundaries and also keep at bay. Simultaneously, John‟s miniaturization and magnification of
the now wild gardens highlighted the space of resistance that had emerged over the years, the
untamed local growth asserting its right to shape the memory of Petit Versailles.
Jacqueline Mills created the space of a break tree that still stands on a former Mississippi
plantation now converted to corporate farming. Break trees were large oaks or other shade trees
beneath which slaves and, later, sharecroppers would gather for breaks without the presence of
owners, overseers, or bosses to impede free discussion. These sites became places for open
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dialogue on social, cultural, and political topics that were prohibited or censored in the presence
of an authority figure. The trees are often retained by corporate farmers because it is too costly
to remove them. Further, descendents of the families who continue to own or manage the land
keep the trees as reminders of the culture(s) they represented and engendered.
Jacqueline‟s tree was a large black paper cut-out, a silhouette that seemed to emerge from
the black earth of the floor and cast itself in shadows against the flickering images of industrial
farming projected on the walls. The floor of the space was covered with cotton balls, implying
the consistent impact of agriculture on the people, the land, and the landscape over the course of
recent history. The simplicity of Jacqueline‟s piece focused attention on the main element, the
tree, magnifying the perspective of those it represented and in contrast to the summary of
agribusiness flickering on the wall. On the one hand, the lack of detail in the representation of
the tree – an abstraction finally – veered the account toward a nostalgic representation of labor
and race relations, “the folk” garnering strength from their mighty tree. On the other hand, the
artificiality of the paper tree and the cotton balls on the floor countered such a bent. The paper
tree seemed to imply the ephemerality of free discussion and the illusion or fragility of power,
while both elements acknowledged the partiality of (all) representation.
I constructed my mini-installation, a miniature house of Big House 310, within and
around a black metal scaffold that typically houses the sound and lighting equipment in the
HopKins Black Box. The scaffold was located in southwest corner of the space, immediately to
the left of the main entrance door. The scaffold is large, consisting of two (5‟ X 7‟ X 6‟) frames,
one set on top of the other. The long sides of the scaffold contain crossbars for support, while
the wide sides have ladders (to enable access to the upper level) and openings to get beneath.
One of the openings, hereafter referred to as the “front door,” faced the audience as they
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approached the scaffold. In front of it was a welcome mat that encouraged the audience to enter
the little house.
Upon crossing the threshold, the audience entered a cozy space with a low ceiling
decorated in twinkle lights. The “walls” of the house were constructed of colorful panels that
hung down from the ceiling along the long sides of the scaffold. The panels were decorated
with reproductions of the 1903, 1908, and 1911 Sanborn maps, with keys and title pages. On the
maps were glow-in-the-dark stars that indicated the location of 310 Convention. Like a prized
memento from a trip, the doll house size model of the “big house” was displayed on a pedestal
directly across from the front door. Illuminated from within, the dollhouse emitted a soft warm
glow that enabled the reading of the texts papered on the exterior of it and also those affixed to
the panels of the walls.
As the audience wandered through the cozy house, a soundtrack of songs played. I chose
the songs based on the use of “house” or “home” in the title, and then arranged them to create
contrasts in sound or content. The lyrics often highlighted themes implicit to my research. The
house is a site of memory and nostalgia in “Our House” by Madness and, in another version,
Crosby, Stills and Nash. In “Burning Down the House” by Talking Heads and “Sonny Came
Home” by Shawn Colvin, a house and home are willfully destroyed. “Come on-a My House” by
Rosemary Clooney and “Tones of Home” by Blind Mellon describe a house and home as places
of refuge and escape. A house is personified in “This Old House” by Rosemary Clooney and
people are housified in “Brick House” by The Commodores.
Outside the “back door” of the scaffold house was a cobblestone path constructed of four
round pieces of wood painted in earth tones and imprinted with an excerpt from Gary Snyder‟s
poem, “Rip Rap.”
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Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things. (Snyder 30)
At the time of the installation, Synder‟s poem expressed how I was thinking about my
house and its poetics. My research seemed a rip rap, rag tag collection of bits and pieces that I
could not quite “place solid.” The dead end paths in trying to contact Barbe and gain inner
access to the house had just about exhausted me until I reflected on the “endless . . . games” I
might engage by making my research “Go” through the play of text, image, and performance.
My desire for solid information about a solid house fixed in a solid place deferred to the potential
power of the spaces I might discover and create in light of the historic and affective fluidity of
the house and the materials I had collected to date. As Synder offers, “all change, in thoughts, as
well as things.”
The wooden cobblestones of “Rip Rap” led the audience around to the north side of the
scaffold house where I had placed some chairs and a projector that looked back at the house. A
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white sheet covered the exterior wall and against it I projected a slide show of materials about
310. The slides included conveyance records for the land and property, deed transfers and
property assessments, LLC incorporation documents, news articles about the house and family,
and photographs of the house at various stages of seeming abandonment and renovation. I
sequenced the documents in chronological order in an effort to communicate the accumulative
history of the archive and I juxtaposed the photographs so as to offer contrasts in perspective,
such as near and far shots.
My miniaturization of 310 reminded me of my childhood construction of little worlds
from the materials collected in my toy box: Little People pieces, Lincoln Logs, Sanborn Maps,
conveyance records, photographs, Tinker Toys, lyrics, letters, and Legos. Like the Little People
house that beckoned me to open it in order to access the collection of materials, my little house
in the Black Box invited the audience to enter a cozy, warmly lit place of collected research and,
while there, to “take the time . . . to see all [the] little things that cannot be seen all together”
(Bachelard 159). Also like my Little People House, the collection of materials and people in the
house constantly overflowed its container, spilling through the gaps in the walls and out the back
door into the “rip rap” of a less stable space of multiple stories and story makers, where “this old
house” could become “our house” could become a “brick house” could become “burning down
the house” as the audience dwelled on and built 310 Convention, less as a scene in itself and
more as a sub-scene in a larger adventure.
My mini-installation also functioned along the lines of mise en abyme: a dollhouse
miniature, set within the miniature of the scaffold house, set within the art house of the HopKins
Black Box, set within the academic house of Coates Hall, set within the institutional house of
LSU, set within the community house of Baton Rouge while the actual house, the little Big
House of 310, stood and still stands blocks away on a dark street downtown. What is the
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relationship between the actual and the fictive real? Through the imagination, does the fictive
world of miniatures confirm abandonment or refigure it within a shifting structure of relations,
one container framing the next within, upon, and against which the next strives to shift values
and gain meanings? While we might say the house of Baton Rouge telescopes and enfolds the
others including 310 within its frame, we also might say that the others including 310 telescope
and enfold Baton Rouge within their frames. The play of frames suggests that while the
miniature(s) “multiplies significance by virtue of the tension it creates between inside and
outside, container and contained, surface and depth” (Stewart 41), the “and” space between
apparent opposites is crucial to the performance of the miniature since it inserts multiple frames,
questioning what is inside and outside, container and contained, surface and depth.
A SPACE IN PLAY
On the nights we presented our installation, the four miniatures of abandoned places
were full of life. By telling of our journeys into the fields and archives of the four locales and
encouraging the audience to take a journey themselves, the installation created a lively preserve
for the places and our research concerning them. Heidegger notes that the act of preserving
consists of something more than the subjective impressions that one might deem of value.
Preserving the work does not reduce people to their private experiences, but brings them
into affiliation with the truth happening in the work. Thus it grounds being for and with
one another as the historical standing-out of human existence in reference to
unconcealedness. Most of all, knowledge in the manner of preserving is far removed
from that merely aestheticizing connoisseurship of the work‟s formal aspects, its qualities
and charms. Knowing as having seen is a being resolved; it is standing within the
conflict that the work has fitted into the rift. The proper way to preserve the work is
cocreated and prescribed . . . by the work. (66)
In the case of Across Disciplines, then, preserving involved placing our research in communal
interaction and asking it (and ourselves) to “stand within the conflict” that the interaction
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created. It also involved inviting the public to “stand within the conflict” too and co-create
meanings from the exchange.
In the discussion period that followed the audience‟s tour of the installation, the guest
respondents and other members of the audience had the opportunity to express their experiences.
Above, I enfolded some of their responses into my reflections on each piece. As regards the
installation as whole, some experienced it in historical terms, finding that the miniature house,
garden, and break tree recalled the landscape of plantation life: lavish gardens protecting the
domestic Big House from the agriculture and labor that lay beyond and also sustained it. In
response, some found that the theatre of graffiti marked the encroachment of post-industrial
urban life and decay on the agrarian landscape and lifestyle. In this frame, the house became a
blighted structure, the break tree a remnant threatened by corporate will, and the garden an
overgrown lot or, as some preferred, a resistant counter that showed the supremacy of nature
over our attempts to control it. Others found that their explicit co-creation of Barbara‟s piece
served as a relay for their interaction with the other pieces or, for some, it highlighted how we all
leave marks upon the social landscape through buildings, gardens, storied trees, and other
expressive means. While some found this marking valuable in itself – linking it to resistant acts
of creativity – others broadened the frame to recognize the diverse meanings made and agendas
gained by the different markings we make.
As for abandonment, many audience members distinguished between the actual sites and
the fictive real miniatures, insisting that the latter (i.e., performance) cannot resolve the real life
issues of abandoned people and places. While others concurred, they also expressed that the
installation imagined an alternative space of “abandonment” where people interacted with the
concepts, practices, and ramifications of abandonment. As Heidegger might observe, by interrelating
and standing within the conflict of a vacant house, forgotten garden, lone tree, and
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ruined theatre, we built alternatives. “The nature of building is letting dwell,” Heidegger writes.
And, “building accomplishes its nature in the raising of locations by the joining of their spaces.
Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build” (157; emphasis in original).
As researcher-performers, we also built an alternative space by miniaturizing and
magnifying aspects of our field and archival research. Thereby, we simultaneously represented
and analyzed the four places, our research collections, and our manner of composition. As with
Derrida‟s theory of the archive, “by incorporating knowledge deployed in reference to it” (i.e., in
reference to the archived place, collection, and miniature container), “the archive augments itself,
engrosses itself, it gains in auctoritas.” However “in the same stroke it loses the absolute and
meta-textual authority it might claim to have. One will never be able to objectivize it with no
remainder . . . and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future” (Archive
Fever 68). The ability of certain miniatures to engross detail and time and thereby extend
meanings more so than fix values also operates to question that affective experience Stewart
aligns with miniatures; namely, “a particular form of interiority, an interiority which the subject
experiences as its sanctuary (fantasy) and prison (the boundaries or limits of otherness, the
inaccessibility of what cannot be lived experience)” (65). While there is no doubt our miniatures
were partial and incomplete, unable to make what is absent present (i.e., a “lived experience”),
they also never presumed to claim such “absolute . . . authority” in relation to that which they
signified. Very like the admitted plasticity of my Little People house, our miniatures
acknowledged their tactics and thereby turned the miniature inside out, gaining meanings by
admitting to their inability to represent fully. The same tactics question the seeming insistence
on Stewart‟s part that our longing for miniature places (e.g., research and/in performance)
equates to a longing to close the distance between the self and other and thereby make the other
present, “live” the other, as if this is the only way we can escape the prisons of our little lives.
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Derrida views things a little differently of course. In response to Lévi-Strauss‟s
recognition that there are no central structures or binaries (such as presence and absence) to
stabilize his work and yet he must use them anyway since such structures are all that are “at
hand,” Derrida notices and advances the alternative of play.
Play is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and
substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain.
Play is always play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must
be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence. Being must be conceived
of as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way
around. (Writing and Difference 292)
For Derrida, just as language plays with the seeming presence and always absence of the
referent, so too being might be conceived; that is, as play, at play. In these terms, one and one‟s
“lived experience” are not defined by being present or making others present, and the absence of
the same is certainly not understood as a prison. Rather, being and lived experience are defined
by playing in the shifting space of time (place and bodies). In a sense, being becomes an archive
– a container of memories, experiences, thoughts, feelings, language, knowledge – and rather
than fix the value of one‟s archive as present or absent or what have you, Derrida encourages us
to play with its inevitable instability and thereby gain multiple meanings for ourselves.
In fairly explicit terms, our installation played with presence and absence since it
assembled people in what we call the present to experience and co-create meanings about
abandoned places. In Derrida‟s more “radical” terms, the play of miniatures influenced the
temporal reality that was created, magnifying research details and thereby encouraging the
audience to slow down and reflect on the meanings rather than accept the given values of the
terms at play, such as abandonment and preservation, imitative and resistant art, nature and
civilization, detail and abstraction, container and contained, remembering and forgetting, and
presence as an arbiter of lived experience and absence as not. In this way, we highlighted “the
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specific zone” of the “imprint” or “trace” where “lived experience . . . is neither in the world nor
in „another world‟ . . . nor more in time than in space.” As a result,
differences appear among the elements or rather [they] produce them, make them emerge
as such and constitute the texts, the chains, and the systems of traces. These chains and
systems cannot be outlined except in the fabric of this trace or imprint. The unheard
difference between the appearing and the appearance (between the „world‟ and „lived
experience‟) is the condition of all other differences, of all other traces, and it is already a
trace. . . . The trace is the differance which opens appearance and signification. (Of
Grammatology 65; emphases in original)
That we were struck by our chosen places and engaged them with passion and intimacy is
demonstrated by our research efforts and subsequent performance. However, the many little
archives that emerged (e.g., research documents, performance installation, our beings at play)
were not and would never presume to be the actual places. They are traces. And they are no less
intimate for being so since they respect that their subject of desire – a house, garden, tree,
theatre, public – “does not let itself be summed up in the simplicity of the present” (Derrida, Of
Grammatology 66). This is the play of the miniature inside out.
PLAYING HOUSE
Three-ten Convention is important to me because it too is a trace of something beyond
my full comprehension. The house extends the play of its many meanings to me, which then
makes my play, my many meanings, possible. However, because it indicates the differance
between (its) appearance and significations in fairly explicit ways, it is threatened by the value of
presence and the progressive will of the future as enacted, for example, in recent renovation
plans for downtown Baton Rouge. By means of this research, I hope to protect and create a
space for the house, perhaps as a miniature archive of the city, the container-contained frames of
meaning (value and will) reversed. Or, perhaps, I create a space simply because I love the house.
As Bachelard might observe, my engagement with 310 is one of topophilia:
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Indeed, the images I want to examine are the quite simple images of felicitous space. In
this orientation, these investigations would deserve to be called topophilia. They seek to
determine the human value of the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be
defended against adverse forces, the space we love. . . . Attached to its protective value,
which can be a positive one, are also imagined values, which soon become dominant.
Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space
subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its
positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination. Particularly, it nearly always
exercises an attraction. (xxxv-xxxvi; emphasis in original)
As I have discussed in this chapter, one way I exercise my attraction is by imitating the
house, understanding that imitation linked with analysis is inventive, aimed at respecting rather
than collapsing differences in time, space, and bodies. The dollhouse within the miniature house
that I installed in the Black Box (another felicitous space I might admit) is one such imitation.
My miniature installation included a soundtrack of house tunes, popular songs that I hoped the
audience would find familiar and appealing and thereby the songs would encourage associative
play on their part. One song I particularly liked was a “House Where Nobody Lives” by Tom
Waits:
There's a house on my block that's abandoned and cold
The folks moved out of it a long time ago
And they took all their things and they never came back
It looks like it's haunted with the windows all cracked
Everyone calls it the house
The house where nobody lives
Once it held laughter, once it held dreams
Did they throw it away, did they know what it means?
Did someone's heart break
Or did someone do somebody wrong?
Well, the paint is all cracked, it was peeled off of the wood
The papers were stacked on the porch where I stood
And the weeds had grown up just as high as the door
There were birds in the chimney and an old chest of drawers
Looks like no one will ever come back
To the house where nobody lives
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Oh, and once it held laughter, once it held dreams
Did they throw it away, did they know what it means?
Did someone's heart break
Or did someone do somebody wrong?
So if you find someone, someone to have, someone to hold
Don't trade it for silver, oh don't trade it for gold
Cause I have all of life's treasures and they're fine and they're good
They remind me that houses are just made of wood
What makes a house grand, oh it ain't the roof or the doors
If there's love in a house, it's a palace for sure
But without love it ain't nothin' but a house
A house where nobody lives
But without love it ain't nothin' but a house
A house where nobody lives (Waits)
I add this song to the research collected and at play in this document. For me, it is a trace of the
house and the house a trace of it. I like that the lyrics reflect certain aspects of 310 and my
relationship to it, such as its seeming abandonment or vacancy, its once cracked paint and peeled
wood, and the laughter, dreams, and heart break I often experience standing outside the house or
as I sit here writing about it. The song is different from the house though and, while I might
elide the differences so as to draw closer to the house through song, I would rather stand within
the conflict of the rift and (shifting between song and house, house and song) choose to defend
the house against the notion that the only houses that can be loved are those where somebody
lives. I dwell in this difference, not in positivity, but with all the partiality of my imagination
and longing.
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CHAPTER FIVE
HOUSE OF CARDS
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.
“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers,
“but by the line of the arch that they form.”
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak
to me of stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”
Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”
-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (82)
To build a house of cards requires the forces of balance and friction, time and patience, as
well as a deck of cards that is not too old or too new. Figuratively, a house of cards is a structure
such as an argument that rests on shaky premises; or it may fall due to forces beyond the control
of the designer. I hope my attempt to build 310 Convention does not confront the latter although
the process has required elements of the former. The house itself seems like a house of cards in
its continued survival amidst downtown renewal efforts. There has been friction between the
owners and the community over the status of the house countered by a balance between the
community’s commitment to preservation and the owners’ desire to keep the house intact and in
the family. The house has withstood the test of time (retaining the line of its arch) and stands
patiently, waiting to see if its story can support a new layer of stones.
So that my house on the page does not fall prey to a shaky foundation, I must consider
the contexts beyond my mild obsession that enable the forces of research necessary to
maintaining its shape. To do so, I have to continue risking that others find some value in the
project and my performance(s) of it as it develops. This balancing act requires that I allow my
paper project to come in contact with other projects and audiences that challenge and expand its
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scope and focus. Its stability also is aided by theoretical and practical insights I fold or find
folded in its layers. According to Heidegger, I have to risk what I have created already to insure
the research continues:
In the Middle Ages the word for balance, die Wage, still means about as much as hazard
or risk. This is the situation in which matters may turn out one way or the other. That is
why the apparatus which moves by tipping one way or the other is called die Wage. It
plays and balances out. The word Wage, in the sense of risk and as the name of the
apparatus, comes from wägen, wegen, to make a way, that is, to go, to be in motion. . . .
To weigh or throw in the balance, as in the sense of wager, means to bring into the
movement of the game, to throw into the scales, to release into risk. (101)
I risk my project appearing too colloquial, subjective, and narrow unless I can develop a praxis
that allows 310 Convention and my research of it to play, or some play, in how the cards are
arranged, how the story unfolds. Some elements can be decided upon in this game, others are
left to chance. The storms that hit the Gulf coast in 2005 threw much out of balance and forced
me to put new ideas into play concerning what my research meant in the balance.
Three-ten Convention is an actual, imaginary, and fictive real site of loss and renewal,
remembering and forgetting, history and historicities – issues that became more pronounced to
me after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit south Louisiana and the surrounding states in the fall of
2005. 1
Hurricane Katrina came ashore on August 29, 2005, cutting a devastating swath through
southeast Louisiana and Mississippi, and southwest Alabama. Rita followed three weeks later on
1
Katrina death tolls vary from source to source, some exceeding 2000 with the inclusion of those who died as a
result of suicide, violence (e.g., during the “looting” of New Orleans), and the interruption of life-sustaining medical
treatments. The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals provides conservative figures, reporting that 1,464
people lost their lives to Katrina and 120 died as a result of Rita. Of the deaths attributed to Katrina, 53% of the
deceased were African-American, 39% Caucasian, 2% Hispanic, 1% Asian/Pacific, 1% Native American, and 5%
unknown. 48% of victims were 51 years or older while 26% were 75 years or older (Louisiana Department of
Health and Hospitals). The hurricanes destroyed or damaged 302,000 housing units across the Gulf Coast. Seven
out of ten of the destroyed or damaged units, 216,000 in all, were affordable to low-income households, and 92,000
were affordable to very low-income households. Of the 200,000 housing units impacted in Louisiana, 40% were
rental units; of these, over half were affordable to households making less than 80% of the area median income. By
one estimate, Hurricane Katrina destroyed up to three-quarters of the affordable rental units for extremely lowincome
households in the New Orleans area. In New Orleans, rents have risen as much as 40 to 200 % since the
storms. Programs to facilitate the rebuilding of rental units have been largely unsuccessful (Kromm and Sturgis 23).
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September 24, 2005, hitting southwest Louisiana and the southeast portion of Texas. The storms
severely affected the key industries of oil, fishing, and tourism in south Louisiana and the social
and cultural infrastructures of the Gulf coast were decimated, leading to an enormous loss of life,
home, and community. Who am I to dream of a better dwelling when I have a roof over my
head? Who is Barbe to keep 310 empty and entombed when so many people might make use of
it? Does this place matter? Why does it matter? What might it tell me about loss, and acts of
remembering and rebuilding? Even those who did not lose their physical dwelling lost some
sense of home in the destruction of their larger city or town and region. Some places that were
damaged by the storms, such as the many public housing projects in New Orleans, now face
demolition in the city’s effort to redevelop as it rebuilds. Will such projects be rebuilt so as to
create a story of public housing that remembers and makes room for the individuals and families
who once built a community there while it also acknowledges the problems of the past so as to
enable more secure and empowering futures?2
I found that the 2005 storms encouraged me, required me, to view my project in the terms
and issues that arose as a result. In terms of such severe physical loss that only memories remain
to assure individuals and communities that they have a past; that they are not tabulae rasae
wiped clean by the forces of history as acts of forgetting. Issues of memory as creative acts of
retrieval and reimagining that make survival and carrying on possible. Issues that call for “my
house” to converse with other projects that insist we remember and then do something about it.
2
Before Hurricane Katrina, 5,100 families lived in public housing in New Orleans. In June 2006, the US
Department of Housing and Urban Development and the HUD controlled Housing Authority of New Orleans
declared their intention to demolish . . . public housing complexes and replace them with privately developed mixedincome
housing. If carried out, the plan would eliminate 4,500 public housing units in New Orleans replacing them
with 800 units of traditional public housing. The plan is proposed at a time when thousands of residents are still
displaced and thousands of others are on a waiting list for low-income housing in the city (Kromm and Sturgis 23).
While the noted demolitions have begun, they are now embroiled in scandal as the former secretary of HUD,
Alphonso Jackson, quit under allegations of corruption that include how and to whom HUD contracts were awarded.
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In this chapter, I inter-relate my project with other projects of creative memory that were
developed in the aftermath of the storms. The first project was created by two students who
evacuated to Baton Rouge from New Orleans and, while in Baton Rouge, took classes at LSU.
The students enrolled in a practical film course I was teaching and, by means of their final
project in the course, they expressed both their loss of and hope for their home places in and
around New Orleans. The second project I discuss is a series of performance installations that
were housed within a benefit for visual artists displaced by the storms. The event was held at the
Shaw Center for the Arts in Baton Rouge three months after the hurricanes and it featured works
by the displaced artists and also those in support of them. The noted installations served to guide
the audience’s movement within and between the galleries and, as I discuss below, they also
came to signify for me key aspects regarding the event and its relationship to the larger task of
remembering and rebuilding communities. One of the installations included my threedimensional
model of 310 Convention (addressed in the prior chapters), which I redesigned for
the benefit. In the fourth section of the chapter, I re-conceive the model as a metonym of the
actual house, and both as metonyms of homes lost and recalled through the forces of history and
memory. As a creative figure of expression, the metonym is a house of cards, striking a
precarious balance between recalling its referent, but partially. It restores through loss. To
interact with this present absence, I enjoin the forces of decollage and bricolage – tearing away
and rebuilding from the remnants. In the last section, I extend the aforementioned discussion to
the other projects I have addressed in the chapter and reflect on the potentially generative power
of the metonym to insist on absence despite the overwhelming force (and currency) of presence
to solve and thereby dismiss it.
In the balance, I learn from the other artists that in times of great loss there emerges not
only a desire to rebuild for the future, but to preserve the intangible intricacies of what was. The
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artists’ seeming inclinations are like those of the inhabitants of Ersilia in Italo Calvino’s Invisible
Cities. In their creative communities, the transient inhabitants construct webs of relationships
that they hope outlast their lives and dwellings.
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch
strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white
according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency.
When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the
inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.
Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the
abandoned cities, without walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which
the wind rolls away: spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form. (76)
A community is a house of cards built of intricate relationships (in friction and balance) over
time and with patience. Literal places mark the effort, and when lost – when the cards tumble –
the intricate relationships may appear to tumble too. However, amidst the rubble of physical
loss and through the force of memory, the relational webs are recovered, if bruised and battered
and (as ever) requiring constant attention to their transformative shifts. It is in these terms that
the stability of place – of placing cards in relation to each other – must be performed.
THE ART OF BALANCING LOSS
In the direct aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many college students transferred to LSU
from schools in the New Orleans area, including the University of New Orleans, Delgado
Community College, and Xavier University. In each of my classes, there were between one and
three transfer students trying to piece together a course of study that met their interests and
degree requirements. Despite the enormous odds, a number of students were able to finish the
semester and earn the course credits they needed. Along with many students enrolled at LSU
prior to the storms, the transfer students found they had to balance attending school with earning
a living, caring for themselves and other displaced family and friends, and returning to their
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storm ravaged communities to retrieve, rebuild, or reflect on what was/not left of their homes.
The precarious balancing act repeated itself a few weeks later in the wake of Rita. 3
Rather than impose an illusion of stability by upholding standard classroom conventions,
my students and I found it more helpful to admit to the instability and alter the conventions.
Attendance became a way to check in with each other, assignment deadlines were “suggested” or
“encouraged,” and many lessons were tailored to address crisis management at both the personal
and communal levels. In my “Introduction to Film” course, there were three transfer students,
two of whom not only completed the semester, but produced work that was complex and
complete in form as well as topical and poignant in content. Jason and Gina were in the film
program at the University of New Orleans. I do not believe they knew each other well.
However, upon transferring to LSU and into my course, their common affiliation united them.
Since, prior to the storms, the class had established the small groups in which they would work
on their projects, Jason, Gina, and the third transfer student formed their own group. When the
third student had to leave, Jason and Gina became a dynamic duo in their own right.
Originally designed by Dr. Patricia Suchy, the final assignment in the course requires the
students to create an experimental movie that “movies” the way a poem “poems.” To introduce
the assignment, I showed the students a film by Maya Deren, which served as the compositional
model for the project, and then I explained the assignment to them:
For the final project, your group will adapt a selected poem into a short (5 minute)
film. The poems on which you may base your film are “One Art” by Elizabeth
Bishop, “Six Significant Landscapes” by Wallace Stevens, “Musée des Beaux
Arts” by W. H. Auden, “Medusa” by Louise Bogan, “Why I am not a painter” by
Frank O’Hara, “You Begin” by Margaret Atwood, and “On Aesthetics” by
Kenneth Koch.
Your adaptation should not be a literal translation of word to image. Instead, you
are to pay special attention to what and how your poem communicates, which is different
3
Vice Provost Frank Cartledge announced that of the 2,700 displaced students who enrolled at LSU after Katrina,
804 resigned before the end of the semester. Of the 1,896 remaining students, 650 qualified to continue at LSU. Of
the “regular” LSU student body, 910 (about 3%) resigned (Gonzales).
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from what it means. Then, you are to translate your understanding into what and how
your film communicates. Think of the poem as a coded set of instructions. You should
film the film like the poem poems.
Your models for the project are Maya Deren’s films Meshes in the Afternoon and
Ritual in Transfigured Time. The structure of Deren’s films is meant to inspire you: the
structure is more like a poem than a narrative although certainly the films make use of
narrative. As you watch the films, consider the rhythm of their movement; note their
symbols and metaphors; and the ways in which they connect images, but also leave the
connections open enough for the viewer to participate in interpreting the films. Above
all, pay attention to how the films communicate. This is a more appropriate and
compelling way to look at the films than to ask what they mean.
Like Deren’s films, your poem communicates through image, through figures of
sound and sense, through the movement of rhythmic language, and through poetic form.
Similarly, your film needs to communicate through image, through visual and acoustic
means, and through the elements of film language, such as the mise en scene, the
montage sequence, the transitions between images, and distance, angle, and focus.
In order to decide how your film will communicate, first work with your poem to
discover and analyze how it works. Who is the “speaker”? What sorts of figurative
language are used – e.g., metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, allusion, irony? Are there
rhymes, assonance, or dissonance? Is there a pronounced rhythm, a regular metrical or
stanza form? How do time and space flow in the poem? What sorts of sensory images
does the poem use to communicate its world to the reader?
Then make the leap and ask how your film might be composed similarly. How do
you create a visual rhyme, for instance? Does your poem move in a montage, or
continuity, or both? How might you adapt the poem’s form? For this project, you are
expected to call upon all of the techniques and methods for composing shots and working
with movement, editing, and post-synchronizing sound. You may use pre-recorded
sound or record speaking voices and other sounds. Think of this project as a chance to
synthesize all of the parts of film language we have studied this semester. (Flanagan)
I asked the students to come to the next class with their top three poem choices so that we could
begin to work on the assignment.
At the following class meeting, Jason and Gina were the first to request a particular
poem, “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. The poem is a villanelle, which consists of five tercets
followed by a quatrain. The first line of the first stanza, or a near approximation, is repeated in
the last line of the second and fourth stanzas and, likewise, the last line of the first stanza is
repeated in the last line of the third and fifth stanzas. The two alternating lines or their variations
become the second rhyming pair of the quatrain. The resulting rhyme scheme is A1
bA2
, abA1
,
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abA2
, abA1
, abA2
, and abA1
A2
. The content of the poem juxtaposes themes of disaster, loss, and
mastery.
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these things will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. (Bishop 39)
In addition to selecting their poem, Jason and Gina also had a good idea as to how they
wanted to adapt it to film. They asked me if it would be alright if they shot footage of their
homes and communities around New Orleans. Both had returned with their families to assess
damage and begin the process of demolition and rebuilding. Gina’s family lived in old Metairie
and lost their home to the 17th
Street Canal breach and Jason’s family home was in Chalmette,
which was flooded by the storm surge off Lake Bourne as well as the breach of the Industrial
Canal. I told them I was comfortable with their plan as long as they felt emotionally safe. They
were eager to begin.
Their final project is titled, New Orleans “Our Home”: 10 Weeks after Katrina. The film
is comprised of a series of images from the New Orleans area, including Jason’s and Gina’s
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neighborhoods. Many of the shots travel from right to left, tracking the destruction as we move
through the neighborhoods. The static debris and devastation is filmed in almost constant
motion, whether zooming in and out from piles of rubble and cracked earth or panning 360
degrees around what is left of a suburban street. There are some digital effects between shots,
like a “push” to the right as the camera passes yet another flooded vehicle or an “iris out” from a
tree to a bunch of discarded washing machines lined up on a curb.4
Most of the images sweep and pulse with the music the filmmakers selected, which is an
instrumental piece of strings, low bass, and percussion framed and underscored by the ticking of
a clock. A synthesized chant pulses beneath the instrumentation too. So, as the music ebbs and
flows in volume and intensity, there is the constancy of an underlying beat and tempo very like
that of a heartbeat. At the penultimate scene, a staccato crescendo of chants accents the rapid
series of zoom-ins on still images of previously seen devastation. The final image is of a gull
soaring over the still waters of Lake Pontchartrain as the scene fades to black and the clock ticks
on.
The film also includes seven brief voiceovers that Jason and Gina drew from taped
interviews they conducted with family and friends. The lines are divided between at least three
speakers, one of whom is female. The first two lines are “This will wipe out all our personal
belongings and assets” and “My two grandsons lost their house too, like my daughter.” The
lines are spoken as the camera tracks along routes filled with large debris, such as appliances,
furniture, and building materials. The third line, “Our wedding photographs can’t be replaced,”
coincides with a still collage of small ruined items, including some toys, clothing, and jewelry.
The fourth phrase, “I haven’t seen my family in two and a half months,” is delivered as the
4
A push is when an image is pushed out of the frame (from side to side or from the top down) by the next image,
which then replaces it. Iris out is when a small iris appears in the center of an image and expands outward, revealing
the next image in the sequence.
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camera tracks past a blown out house and neighboring debris. “Lost all their belongings and
house” is spoken as the camera pans 360 degrees around Jason’s neighborhood in Chalmette.
The camera tracks across the top of the 17th
Street Canal breech looking back towards Gina’s
area of Metairie as the sixth line is delivered, “I never thought that we’d be flooded like this.”
The final line is heard after a black out as the camera tracks past a house with a hand painted sign
stating, “I will rebuild.” There is a blackout and the speaker tells us, “The sad thing is you’re
exhausted and yet you know you’ve not even really begun the path getting everything completed
and back to living your life as a normal individual again” (LeRoy and Guillory). Certainly
related, the spoken text seems to alternate between expressions of material loss and the
emotional toll of the storm. The final line operates like the quatrain of the villanelle in that it
combines elements of the five prior expressions into one statement concerning the fragile if
determined process of mastering loss.
In their commitment to the project and their creation of the piece, Jason and Gina enact
Heidegger’s notion of dwelling by “staying with things” and “sparing and preserving” what is
left of their homes, communities, and culture (145). In titling their film New Orleans “Our
Home,” they engage Derrida’s chain of difference as one place defers to the other without
replacing it. So too, the title and film imagery defer to each other, creating a web of intricate
relations between community (as) home (as) devastation (as) hope (as) memory, created and
vital. As with Bishop’s poem, they strike a precarious balance due to the friction between
undeniable loss and the creative act of remembering, the “art of losing.” In this way, they insist
on the absence of all they and their families have lost and on the continuance of relations that
will enable them to pick up the pieces (the tumble down of cards) and, with time and patience,
transform them into a place of renewal and hope.
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RELATIONAL WEBS
On December 2, 2005, Baton Rouge Artists Give 100%, a fundraiser for artists
displaced by the storms, was staged at the Shaw Center for the Arts in downtown Baton Rouge.
One of the co-sponsors was the Brunner Gallery, which resides on the second floor of one wing
of the Shaw Center. The owner and his wife, Rick and Susan Brunner, had sustained storm
damage to their home and Rick’s workshop in Covington, Louisiana, which is located on the
north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. On the night of the benefit, the Brunner Gallery displayed art
works by Brunner and other displaced artists that could be purchased separately from those
displayed in a gallery on the ground floor and donated (also for purchase) by Baton Rouge area
artists. The event organizer, Paul Neff, had contacted me to ask if I knew of performers who
would be willing to contribute performance installations to the benefit. I contacted three doctoral
students in the Department of Communication Studies at LSU who, like me, concentrate in
Performance Studies. They agreed to participate, developing new or adapting pre-existing pieces
for the event.
Gretchen Stein Rhodes installed her piece in the Brunner Gallery on the threshold of a
door leading to an adjacent theater. She sat at a small table covered with white lace, dressed in a
white Victorian lace blouse and long full white skirt. The stark white setting and attire were
contrasted by Gretchen’s red lips and shoes. As Gretchen sat at the table, she sharpened one
pencil after another down to their nubs, collecting the shavings in a wooden bowl placed on the
table. Arranged at her feet among lace were a palm frond, a Bible, a white ceramic bird, and
some paintbrushes. Behind her, a loop of images and text were projected. The projected
materials and the installation as a whole drew on Gretchen’s doctoral research concerning the
affective aesthetics of the displays in the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum located in Boston,
Massachusetts. Contrary to the now standardized categories for displaying art works in
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museums, Gardner arranged her collection according to associations she made. Further, she
stipulated that upon her death the collection and its displays remain unchanged. Gretchen’s
piece was installed amidst works by artists directly affected by Katrina. The displayed pieces
were the last remnants of or first works following the storm and, as such, they represented the
artists’ personal experiences and material needs. The selling of the works would benefit the
artists directly.
The event context – a benefit designed to respond to losses incurred as a result of the
storm – influenced how Gretchen’s piece functioned at the time and my subsequent
interpretation of it here. As I see it, the piece struck a tensive balance between determined and
undetermined forces. On the one hand, various components evoked a force of will to create and
maintain an austere and untouched reality. The content of Gretchen’s projections, her white
costume and staid demeanor positioned within a carefully composed tableau and gallery of
works reflected Gardner’s directives and also the broader curatorial aim to context “fine art” as
objects beyond change. On the other hand, the leakage of red excess from Gretchen’s (silent)
mouth and (unmoving) feet, the inevitable “shaving away” of time, the constantly changing
projections, and the “storm” context implied the ever-shifting circumstances that counter will,
marking the installation and the other pieces in the gallery as transient. While Gretchen’s piece
expressed our longing for stability (the longing of the artist, collector, viewer, and community), it
also risked that longing by showing that stability is always “in motion”; always in “the
movement of [a sometimes cruel] game” of chance and change (Heidegger 101).
Downstairs, in the cramped entranceway to the gallery of donated works, Melanie
Kitchens installed a beggars (borrowed) opera that drew on the aesthetic conventions of the
Bauhaus School, Theater of Images, and chance composition. Titled An Opera in Five Eggs, the
piece was based on the results of specific tasks assigned Melanie by another performance artist,
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thereby inciting chance associations that Melanie might not have made had she determined all
the choices herself. The tasks and resulting materials included dream work, pirating bits from
others’ conversations, borrowing or stealing three objects to use in the performance (i.e., an
umbrella, a yoga mat, and a bouquet), and selecting five images to inform the composition of the
piece. The five images were a cracked egg, a large turtle, a postcard of an egg and a brain, a
picture of a deejay spinning records, and a photo of Robert Wilson, who is known for his
spectacular surreal operas of meticulously crafted imagery. Melanie selected the egg and
specifically its yolk as the unifying motif of the piece, performing her actions on a large, bright
yellow map of swirls made from many smaller maps. Each act or egg of her performance began
with a tableau based on her chosen images and included a character commonly associated with
one of the objects or images, such as a turtle, yoga instructor, and Mary Poppins with her
umbrella. Like Wilson’s operas, the montage of tableaus, the seemingly arbitrary imagery, and
the crafting of painterly and sculptural space encouraged the audience to interpret the piece by
making associative connections of their own.
In the context of the benefit, Melanie’s swirly map mat reminded me of the satellite
imagery of the storm, its looped progressions threatening the edges of my television screen.
Melanie’s eye focus, still tableaus, and interactions with the different objects were contained
within the mat and the mat within the cramped entryway to the gallery. Again, given the context,
I could not help but be reminded of how the contingencies of the storm, any storm, dis/places
bodies to contained spaces – attics, roofs, buses, helicopters, institutional centers – with the
remnants of one’s life in hand, a chance collection of what one can pick up and carry at the time.
The spatial dynamics also evoked an ironic discomfort that I attribute to the poetics and politics
of viewing. Melanie composed the space so as to juxtapose her containment and lack of eye
contact with the audience’s freedom to move and view her undetected. The noted “freedoms”
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were qualified in that the close proximity of the performer to the audience prompted a selfawareness
regarding one’s choice to stand close to the performer and watch her or ignore her
efforts altogether, neither of which is a comfortable option necessarily. Out of respect or desire,
we feel compelled to watch and yet the close up view feels impolite. In this way, Melanie
encouraged the audience to reflect on what it means to watch contained bodies in space. Without
stretching the point too far, Melanie’s piece recalled (with a difference) the efforts of the mass
media who trained our eyes on the victims of the storm – appealing to our desire for information,
eliciting our empathy for the victims, and inciting anger toward the media spectacle and our
collusion with it.
In addition to balancing the forces of dis/placement and un/detected viewing, Melanie
also balanced the reflective somewhat melancholy tone of the piece with whimsy. The latter
emerged through the performer’s pleasure in her technical ability to craft the intricate web of
relations and her creative play with the different objects and images. In a sense, her play became
a practical tactic for carrying on within and despite the constraints of the material world in which
she found herself.
Inside the gallery of donated works, Danielle Sears Vignes donned a tyvek suit and
displayed slides from her Chalmette home and community, both pre and post Katrina. She began
the piece sitting on a stool listing some colloquial expressions from her hometown. Next, she
told of her family’s first return to their home to inspect the damage from the storm and to see
what they could salvage. Her script included additional family stories and also references to
local lore and landmarks. However, Danielle quickly chose to go off-script, engaging in
conversations with the audience. Her choice, she said, was due to the emotional toll of
remembering Chalmette as it once was and now clearly was not. The performance became an
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informal conversation between Danielle and the gallery audience who asked questions, offered
condolences, and shared their own experiences of donning a tyvek suit to “go home.”
While the performance did not go as scripted, the piece that emerged highlighted how
everyday conversation and, therein, the telling of anecdotes is a verbal art form that people know
well and are comfortable and creative in applying. Because knowledge and use of the form is
shared, people engage with relative ease in coproducing this/their mutual performance. In the
benefit event, Danielle put aside her planned piece wagering that the audience shared not only
the skills of conversation and storytelling, but also invested knowledge regarding the content. In
this way, Danielle activated a social form that she and her community sought in order to express
their experiences and confirm their relational ties (cf., Calvino 76). In terms of secular ritual, we
might understand that the resulting performance served as a redressive act (e.g., inciting
communitas and proposing a model for community interaction) that responded to the ongoing
social drama(s) in the aftermath of the storms (Turner 70-71; 47-48).
Beneath the staircase that led to and from the Brunner Gallery, I installed my piece,
which consisted of an updated model of the house, a slide show of images and text, Jason and
Gina’s film, and a few other items that further helped to context the piece in terms of the current
event. In 2003, 310 Convention had undergone external renovations, one of which was a
cosmetic facelift in the way of a yellow paint job. For safety purposes, a chain link fence had
been erected around the house and, at the time of the benefit and thereafter (as I write now), it
had not been removed. To reflect and refract the changes, I covered the exterior of my miniature
model in yellow tissue paper and illuminated it from the inside. In the slide show, I included
images that showed the various stages of the renovation, and with Jason and Gina’s consent, I
alternated looped viewings of their film and my slides, projecting the assemblage of imagery on
the exterior wall beneath the stairs. Lastly, I cordoned off the piece with some fencing and
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yellow caution tape. A guest book welcoming audience signatures and comments provided an
ironic counter to the cautionary references.
As I see it, in the context of the benefit, my installation served as a fairly explicit
reminder of where we were in December 2005 and why we were assembled. The juxtaposition
of film imagery that showed the destruction of homes and neighborhoods with that of the
renovated model (representing a likewise renovated house) might be read as an ironic contrast or
friction between the two sites – i.e., the travesty of expending resources on an abandoned shell of
a Baton Rouge home while resources are lacking for rebuilding homes in the southeast and
southwest parishes. In the broader context of rebuilding issues, the physical model with its
largely cosmetic updates implies the unimaginative folly of a surface address of issues as
compared to an in-depth analysis of the (geographic and social) forces at work on the fragile
house(s) of cards. While intended to safeguard individuals, the fencing and yellow tape inscribe
the home place as unsound. Such inscriptions provide an errant excuse for the slow flow of
federal monies and insurance payments for rebuilding, and open the door for entrepreneurs and
their visions of commercial redevelopment. To insure that community and family structures –
the webs of intricate relationships – are sustained in the rebuilding process, time and patience are
needed. We must enter the house (the tumble down of cards) and take a close look at how it was
built and might be rebuilt, similarly or differently, card-by-card stone-by-stone, cognizant of
balancing the diverse desires and needs of people and the land on which they build their lives.
REFLECTIONS AND ECHOES: A METONYM OF IMAGES
Leaving the benefit from the Third Street entrance, walking half a block north to
Convention Street and then half a block east, I arrive at 310 Convention. When I first noticed the
house many years ago, she showed her age: wrinkles of paint chip and chemical peel, which
some may have referred to as blight. These days, she wears a new yellow coat with accessorized
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trim that leaves her taut and smooth, her wrinkles well hidden. My three-dimensional model is
yellow too: tissue paper yellow like the Sanborn maps with the tint of texts that paper the foam
core beneath. My act of bricolage – tissue and texts apparent but re-functioned to serve as paint
– induces an impulse to decollage, to peel away the layers to reveal what lies beneath just as I
would like to peel away the layers that hide the wrinkles of my house. In these ways, the model
is a metonym of the house. It bears direct associations to the referent it restores, but always,
always partially. Like my research, it restores through loss, through an art of losing I would
hope. It is a wager that I risk.
Figure 18. Relations: Shaw Center for the Arts & 310 Convention, 2008
(photo by Live Search Maps).
If windows are the eyes to a home then 310 Convention has gone from cataracts to
mirrored lenses. When I first started to document the house, all of its original windows were
intact, complete with weather streaked glass and rusty screens. Actual and imagined glimpses of
the interior were always through multi-textured filters. The new reflective windows might offer
a crisp clear view of the interior – if I could get close enough to them, press my face against
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them, in an effort to reduce the reflective glare. As it is, I stand on the other side of the chain
link fence (a remnant of renovation, a cautionary keep out) watching the windows mirror the
environment outside the house: ductwork, light poles, clouds, trees, me.
Figure 19. Windows and Trim, April 8, 2003 and January 3, 2006 (photos by the author).
However, when viewed in the right light at the right angle, some of the new windows
allow for glimpses of the interior rooms. The photos I make of these views are often a bricolage
that layers the image of interior details with the image of exterior elements reflected off the glass
of the window. The result is a partial representation of both that “forgets” some of the light rays
while it “remembers” others, merging the remaining memories into a visual conversation of
reflected light. The conversation is not clear. Rather, I want to say it is a visual echo of voices
from disparate sources speaking simultaneously, their sound waves bouncing off each other to
reverberate between. To decipher the conversation, I find I must perform decollage.
One of my favorite photos was taken through an open porch window on the west side of
310. Through it I can see the dark wood frame of an interior window on the west side of the
house in friendly conversation with the dark wood frame of a window on the east side of the
house, a parking lot of sunlit steel beyond. A window latch catches my eye. It’s high in the
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frame, the window large. If unlatched and opened, the window would let in a lot of air, a chill
breeze in winter, a no breeze in summer, the cicada at dusk. Between the force of upright
frames, more dark wood uprights with crafted curves; I count four in refracted counterpoint: a
banister. A partial banister in support of the partial railing I hold to climb the absent stairs to the
second floor. In harmonic friction with the bass note of vertical frames, the diagonal of the dark
wood railing is repeated in white, over and over and over again, in the railings one holds to climb
the absent stairs to the floors of the building behind me, outside the house. Unhappy with the
conversation, a busted beam grumbles in the foreground.
Figure 20. Visual Reverb, May 7, 2006 (photo by the author).
Through reflected tree branches and the windows of a high rise, I make out echoes of an
archway and a molded mantelpiece, loving details attending to a past I don’t know. They
whisper amidst the forest of branches that have entered and (re)claimed the house, as if in a
fairytale or myth or those books about the machine in the garden only reversed.
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Figure 21. Layered Light, July 16, 2007 (photos by the author).
While the photos shown above perform new or at least unique compositions, it is evident
that their various elements derive from and refer to structures that are not wholly present. The
result is a sensory bricolage of reflections and echoes, a performance that is no less real than
those in which the elements are new and hence fully present. That is to say, presence is only
possible in things that are new, as if the new is ever possible. We rebuild constantly.
From my various view points into the house, I can see no furnishings save for those I
glimpse on the front porch. Prior to the renovation, an opaque drapery covered the glass
windows that enclosed the porch. When construction began, the drapery was removed, revealing
remnants of a place that seemed to meet both personal and professional functions. My view
from the west side shows a pair of lazy, low slung rattan chairs with cushions for the back and
behind to sit a spell on a hot summer night an iced drink in hand listening to the low buzz of city
life up on Third Street, the blast of a barge, the coo of a dove, the “help” in their homes
elsewhere. There also is a magazine stand (or perhaps it’s for plants?) and a metal and glass
medicine cabinet, its doors slightly ajar. Clay pots and gardening tools clutter the furnishings as
if someone has left the spring potting undone. Through the glass door on the north side, I can
make out an oval window on what was once the front face of the house before the porch was
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added. At night, from another angle through the same door and directly above the exterior (now
interior) wooden door, I can see a sign that indicates the home’s first owner and his profession.
“J. R. Fridge,” the sign says, followed by an “M” and I imagine a “D” too.
Figure 22. Front Porch Views, January 3, 2006, April 8, 2003, and July 13, 2007
(photos by the author).
A practical understanding and use of the metonym aims toward efficiency: whole for the
part, part for whole, life as vita, history as chronology, story as list: porch, chair, drink, stand,
cabinet, pots, Fridge, M. D. While the efficient metonym bears a direct association to its
referent, it is not concerned with “quoting” it and certainly not concerned with discussing what it
leaves out (e.g., the “help” in their homes elsewhere), since such quotation and discussion would
slow things down. The efficient metonym builds language to create the illusion that what we
read or see or hear is all we need to read or see or hear. It is a house without wrinkles, a figure of
language without spacing, the performance of communication without negotiation
Of course, the latent power of the metonym lies in its creative inclinations, when it uses
its partial form to call attention to its partiality; when it quotes or discusses what is shortchanged,
left out, lost, or absent in the metonymic process. It is a house without wrinkles. The
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creative metonym is like bricolage (which is not to say it is bricolage) since, in its reuse of old
things, bricolage refers to but does not replace them. It too quotes or discusses them, usually
with comic or whimsical pride since part of its job is to poke fun at the notion of “new” by
making adept reuse of the old, the disposed of, the left-over, the remnant. We might say
bricolage bears a comic attitude toward loss while that of the metonym is tragic or, at the very
least, pensive.
Bricolage then is about building or, rather, rebuilding whether it be language, research,
text and tissue paper, light and sound waves, a house, a city, a region. In fact, in France,
Bricolage is the name of a chain of stores that carry building supplies, sort of like our Lowe’s
and which, also like our Lowe’s, handymen and women (bricoleurs) frequent often. My point is
simple: with attention paid to the past a sturdy house can be rebuilt. This, I believe, is implicit in
the art of losing.
In And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, John Berger reflects,
The visible brings the world to us. But at the same time it reminds us ceaselessly that it is
a world in which we risk to be lost. The visible with its space also takes the world away
from us. . . .
To this human ambiguity of the visible one then has to add the visual experience
of absence, whereby we no longer see what we saw. We face a disappearance. And a
struggle ensues to prevent what has happened, what has become invisible, falling into the
negation of the unseen, defying our existence. Thus, the visible produces faith in the
reality of the invisible and provokes the development of an inner eye which retains and
assembles and arranges, as if in an interior, as if what has been seen may be forever
partly protected against the ambush of space, which is absence.
. . . Appearances belong to the boundless space of the visible. With his inner eye
man experiences the space of his own imagination and reflection. Normally it is within
the protection of this inner space that he places, retains, cultivates, lets run wild or
constructs Meaning. (50, 51; emphasis in original)
My process in this section has helped me realize how and why I have developed “an inner eye”
over the course of my research. When I look at 310, I “face a disappearance,” less so in the
literal than in the figurative sense although the one might lead to the other. (The collapse of
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space in the figuration of what we mean by “downtown redevelopment” may well lead to the
demolition of this fenced-off remnant.) By attending to what is absent, partial, or incomplete in
the house I view, the maps I peruse, the model(s) I make, the photos I take, the words I write, I
learn to restore loss without insisting it be present. Bricolage teaches me to rebuild with
attention paid to the loss. Together, the metonym and bricolage reveal an inner space that allows
me to protect and dwell in what I have remembered and rebuilt. The expression of partialities
“produces a sense of place” (Ulmer 39), in “the spacing of things” (Derrida, Chora L Works
109), through the imagination. It is “a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but – As
birds’ wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination
affirm reality by their flight” (Williams, Spring and All 149-150).
Figure 23. In/visible Negotiation, July 16, 2007 (photo by the author).
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FRICTION AND BALANCE, TIME AND PATIENCE
The subjunctive realm of the imagination and its performances cannot revitalize the
actual structure of 310 or rebuild actual homes lost to the storms. However, as was the case
with Baton Rouge Artists Give 100%, the manifestation of the imagination in concrete
performances of artistic expression can generate actual funds that contribute to the rebuilding
effort. Just as important, the subjective realm can serve as a site for imagining and rehearsing
what might be entailed in rebuilding. It serves as equipment for living, as Kenneth Burke might
say.
As performance, the benefit served as a site for the individual expression of stories,
thoughts, feelings, and opinions regarding the storms and, also, one’s reasons for participating in
the event, whether as artist or audience. The two are enfolded in this case: by attending the event
one chooses to remember the storms in one way or another. The benefit also united those in
attendance in a common cause, resulting in communitas. Thirdly, in these ways, the benefit
helped us imagine and rehearse an “art of losing” that I believe is generative and hopeful.
Through Nietzsche, Michel Foucault calls for an “effective history” or genealogy that
attends to events in time by tracking recurrences and disparities in the archival record, which he
views as a “field of entangled and confused parchments . . . that have been scratched over and
recopied many times” (139). In other words, the memories and counter memories in the archive
indicate distinct and partial perspectives on a given event. Thereby, they show culture in action,
culture being made through the confluence of what is remembered and forgotten or lost.
Understanding that distinct and divergent perspectives are an undeniable force of history and
culture making, Foucault urges the historian to attend to those in the archive and, also,
acknowledge her own “slanted” perspective – her own “appraisal” of the events she studies –
taking care to ground her partial view in the circumstances of her “particular time and place”
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(156, 157). As I mentioned in the first chapter, the concept and practices of the mystory call for
a similar acknowledgement on the part of the author. Such perspective knowledge is articulated
most explicitly through the personal discourse one crafts, often in terms of artistic or creative
models (forms and conventions) of writing and other media. A less explicit though no less
irrefutable indicator of perspective is expressed through the network of materials and discourses
the author selects and arranges so as to tell her story, which due to its content and form is a story
of others too.
In these terms, the benefit might be understood as an historical event of culture making in
which distinct and divergent stories and views regarding the storms and resulting issues were
expressed through multiple media. In her installation, Gretchen ciphered her research interests
regarding the affects of a seemingly stable collection of art work through the benefit event and its
concerns. The story that emerged expressed a longing for stability (e.g., on the part of Gardner,
curators and collectors generally and, I speculate, those in attendance at the event), while it also
showed that stability is liable to the forces of history and those who make it – including, it would
appear, Gretchen. Melanie crafted a story and perspective that focused on dis/placement and
un/detected viewing, issues that are pertinent to her studies and the inscription of storm victims
as transmitted through the mass media. Balancing melancholy with whimsy, Melanie also
articulated a broad tactic for survival in her inventive play with the bits and pieces (the objects
and images) left to her by chance. Responsive to the contingencies of the event, Danielle
amended her story and view by including those of the audience. By means of the familiar forms
of conversation and anecdote, the co-creators confirmed relational ties while also sharing distinct
experiences of the storm and its aftermath
My installation, which included Jason’s and Gina’s movie, offered a perspective on
individual and community homes in peril, at risk in the physical, discursive, and institutional
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storms of history. As a metonym of the actual house and remnant houses generally, my model of
310 argued against cosmetic rebuilding, urging instead an in-depth analysis of the in/visible
forces at work in any re/building. In New Orleans, “Our Home,” Jason and Gina focused on
their homes first and then broadened their perspective to include the “home” of the community to
which access has been denied or inhibited. The reasons for the restriction lie in the immediate
fallout of a natural disaster as opposed to one family’s obstinacy as has been my experience with
310. However, in light of the institutional inscription of the homes as unsound and, hence,
vulnerable to the forces of progress (demolition and commercial cooption), the restrictions are
similar. The installation recognized what is undeniably lost and anticipated what can be lost
should we erase the past in our drive forward. This erasure includes physical homes and the
relational web of families and communities they, in part, represent. Attending to this web is
risky business since it requires balancing the forces of in/stability in an effort to avoid the
totalizing effect of (devolutionary) stagnation on the one hand and (evolutionary) progress on the
other – i.e., the evolutionist view that the present is an unquestionable improvement on the past.
While distinct in the stories they told and the views they proffered, the individual pieces
and those who created and viewed them were united in the space and time of the benefit, which
had as its specific aim the raising of funds for artists displaced by the storms. As I noted earlier,
by participating in the event, the artists and audience chose to remember the storms and attend to
at least one of its many repercussions. Thereby, they were united by broader experiences and
issues than that of helping the displaced artists, which is not to under-estimate the importance of
doing so. As representatives of a regional community devastated by the worst natural disaster in
US history, those in attendance understood in experiential if not cognitive terms what Foucault
means when he says that bodies are “totally imprinted by [the forces of] history” (148). In their
various ways, all the participants shared the imprint of the physical storm as well as those of the
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institutional and discursive storms that raged in the aftermath. And I believe it is fair to say that
the participants understood the mark as one of undeniable loss, which they chose to remember by
attending the event. In this way, they also demonstrated that bodies are not only imprinted by
history, but imprint it through the actions they perform in space and time. In this case, the
assembled community performed a benefit that featured and celebrated the arts, through which
they expressed their resilience and hope. In Victor Turner’s terms, they experienced
communitas, or that “moment when compatible people . . . obtain a flash of lucid mutual
understanding” that their problems can be resolved “if only the group . . . [can] sustain its
intersubjective illumination” (48; emphasis added). By remembering their mutual loss through
distinct creative expressions, the community rehearsed ways to rebuild. They performed an art
of losing. However, as Turner implies, sustaining the inter-subjective understanding that diverse
people and perspectives constitute the public space (of rebuilding in this case) is difficult. The
rehearsal runs in fits and starts, the quotidian intra-subject runs willy-nilly toward her future, and
the ever fragile house of cards trembles.
The benefit performance of loss and hope touches on and articulates our deep human
need for building . . . so that we may dwell . . . “in place” (Heidegger 144). Entailed here are the
sustenance and nurture of the intricate webs of individual and social relations. Involved too is
the recognition that all our recollections and views of these webs are partial and incomplete. We
restore through loss. As Maurice Halbwachs writes in On Collective Memory:
We preserve memories of each epoch in our lives, and these are continually reproduced;
through them, as by a continual relationship, a sense of identity is perpetuated. But
precisely because these memories are . . . successively engaged in very different systems
of notions, at different periods of our lives, they have lost the form and appearance they
once had. They are not intact vertebra of fossil animals which would in themselves
permit reconstruction of the entities of which they were once a part. (47)
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The house of cards is rebuilt through the individual and collective recognition of loss and it is the
loss (our metonymic grasp of the past) that helps us understand the similarities and differences in
our perspectives. Like the bricoleur, it is in light of (and not despite) our partialities that we
must place our perspectives in conversation and thereby, with time and patience, rebuild a sturdy
house in which to dwell.
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CHAPTER SIX
A FULL HOUSE
In this study, I have filled (out) 310 Convention with figures that create chains of
signification in an attempt to express how the house, its archives, and I perform its history.
On the one hand, I have created a “full house” of cards, each chapter a unique playing card that
contributes to the meanings and values of the other cards. For instance, Chapter Two might be a
Queen Victorian, the era and style of the house initiating the hand I play there. As it turns out,
the meanings of the old Victorian house are not as uniform or easily accessed as I assumed they
would be. Beneath the stolid exterior are divergent stories and perspectives that constantly shift
and redefine the act of remembering an old dwelling. Chapter Three is a Queen Bee. Embedded
in the structure of the hive, she supplies it with the worker bees or archivists who sustain and
activate the hive through their constant collection, distillation, and transformation of materials.
Chapter Four is an Ace of Hardware representing the tools and labor of those who build places in
spaces so as to better understand the conceptual as well as practical aspects of building and
dwelling. Chapter Five is an Ace of Hearts, the ultimate gesture of a community in crisis coming
together to help each other rebuild their lives by creating an art of remembering. The final card
is the Queen of Hearts represented by this chapter in which I discuss how the document
magnifies the pre-eminence of topophilia in how we build, dwell, and preserve the material
places and relational traces in the spaces we call home.
On the other hand, I have not created a “full house” at all since the very assumption
contradicts the signifying potential of each chapter and the document as a whole, claiming a
“win” in the card game of sense-making rather than acknowledging how the cards and their
interplay are always partial and incomplete. The document overflows its boundaries due as
much to the cards I lost in the shuffle as to those I held and played. The “full house” I have
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created then is a house constituted by metonymic forms and expressions in conversation with the
many sources that compel them, and which also operate in terms of metonymic partiality. The
hand I play regarding 310 Convention is a “call” – not so as to conclude play, but rather to attend
to and remember loss so as to compel future play in the building and dwelling of text, place,
performance, and community.
Three-ten Convention is transformed throughout the document in terms of the informing
tropes of each chapter: pop up house, wax house or hive, miniature doll house, house of cards,
and full house. In each case, the trope provided a model for how I performed writing about the
materials and issues I discovered while researching 310 Convention. Below, I summarize key
points in the prior chapters, addressing how each trope functioned to frame what I discovered.
In Chapter Two, I recounted and composed my initial research process so that it would
reflect the many possibilities that “popped up” and surprised me in the early stages. Martin
Heidegger’s notions of dwelling and building provided the impetus to “stay with” 310
Convention even when it was not easy to collect or interpret the meanings that arose. I
transformed the inter-discursive and inter-subjective entanglement of theoretical, practical,
archival, anecdotal, personal, and public ways of knowing into chora, as both Derrida’s spacing
on the page and Ulmer’s generative process of discovery and invention. As I modeled 310
Convention, I took delight in folly, in unfixing singular notions of historic value that might deem
the house insignificant.
In Chapter Three, I addressed the question of how archives, particularly maps, perform,
and how they might serve as models for research and/as performance. Daniel Pastorius’ notion
of the archive as hive provided a dynamic model that acknowledges the collective activity
involved in the construction and maintenance of an archive and the structures of knowledge
therein. As archives, the Sanborn Maps perform an accumulation of stories about 310
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Convention and the surrounding city. The maps are subject to the different conventions used to
compose the hard bound and digital maps, which affected my relationship to and use of the
information contained in each. The transformative potential of the Sanborn Maps archives
occurs when we recognize the structures and anti-structures embedded in their forms, the
building details the maps cannot represent, and those dwellings on the maps that no longer exist.
I integrated the material culture of the maps into my research by transforming their
substance and structure into a three-dimensional model of 310 Convention, performing the house
like the archives. The model functioned as a metonym for how the maps in particular and the
archives in general perform in and as miniature. I also performed the efficiency and economy of
the maps in my (re)use of terms and images in how I wrote the chapter. My archival collection
was “modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts” (de Certeau 117),
producing excesses and contradictions that required me to operate reflexively, taking time and
care in my collection and composition of the details.
In Chapter Four, I focused on the metonymy of form, particularly how miniatures
perform the partialities of remembering and forgetting place and space. The figure of the doll
house is a metonym of the magnification of detail that occurs in the act of miniaturization
whether through language, artifact, or performance method. Miniaturization urges us to slow
down in our observation, description, and critical reflection of the miniaturized object.
My enactment of 310 Convention as a mini-installation was a “fictive construction,” in
which my prior experiences researching the house were enfolded. The house became a miniature
echoing themes of abandonment, lost eras and landscapes, and the desire to preserve, spare, and
(re)build the places we love. In the Across Disciplines installation, my miniature 310 was placed
in conversation with other projects concerned with “places that evoke a sense of the past.”
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Activated by the researchers and audience, the four projects created chains of
signification in the fictive real space of performance. This document is another iteration of the
miniaturization of the house and its research. An imprint of a space of différance is created
between the fictive real house composed here and in the installation and the actual house that I
have not experienced except from without.
The miniature as metonym also recognizes what it cannot make manifest, the absence it
cannot make present by means of its miniaturized forms. Absent from our mini-installations
were the lived experiences of those represented by the places we researched. This lack did not
foreclose however the imaginative potential of topophilia, which enabled us to preserve the
spaces of our research through forms of expressive miniaturization. Following Derrida, we
encouraged our audience to play in the instability of being by reflecting on what was included
and magnified in our research, and by partaking in the co-creation of meanings that arose
through performance. However, such notions of imaginative play were disrupted by the storms
of 2005. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita compelled me to recognize that we cannot rebuild
devastated homes, communities, and regions through metonymic expressions alone.
In Chapter Five, the tropes I articulated to help me construct and express 310 Convention
were destabilized, like a fragile house of cards, by the impact of the storms. Building, dwelling,
and preserving took on added significance in my research, prompting me to wager my project in
the balance of larger community concerns. In the chapter, I juxtaposed topophilia for an
insignificant dwelling against the mastery of loss presented in my students’ film, New Orleans:
“Our Home.” While Jason’s and Gina’s project could not restore their homes and communities,
their willingness to remember the loss helped to restore the relational webs of those places. The
fictive real spaces of art and performance allowed us to transform our sense of loss into acts of
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remembering that moved beyond thoughts and into action, first and foremost in the labor of
creative production.
Remembering activated communitas during the fundraiser for displaced artists. The
event brought together people affected by the storms in various ways. The bodily engagement of
performers, artists, and participants created a transformative space in which the participants
refashioned the imprint of loss into a creative act, an art of remembering the communal body
necessary to rebuilding spaces in which to dwell. One event will not rebuild a region, city, or
home, but if we do not wager to preserve such moments of communitas we risk creating
uninhabitable places, in which there is no space to dwell.
SHOWING MY HAND
In this section, I am called on to reveal the significance of my hand. Queen Victorian
delights in the folly that arises when we compose histories in ways that allow the indeterminate
and often arbitrary associations (as well as the pleasures of more determined processes) to occur.
The Queen Bee has earned her right to dwell in the hive by building herself into its form. She is
a metonym of the substantive and structural transformations that result from the activities
performed by the worker bees she has produced. The Aces of Hardware and Hearts are linked
through their use of multiple temporalities that demonstrate how signs of the past are always
present in the restored behaviors, labor, material, and tools of performance. Performance is
embedded with losses that can be recognized through the metonymic bits it fashions in creative
acts of remembrance. The mystory becomes the tool for addressing how the Queen of Hearts
transforms the previous cards into the hand I play in the construction of this document. The text
engages multiple discourses from the fields – the spaces and places – of philosophy,
performance, and material culture, professional, popular, and personal domains, national and
local histories in an effort to compose a performance about a particular place. The discursive
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interplay helps me articulate how we might build and dwell in texts that transform material
culture and performance practices into spaces of metonymic possibility that attend to the acts of
remembering and forgetting. We must wager the mix of old and new so as to (re)build and
preserve the relational webs of the felicitous spaces we love, or we risk losing more than just our
homes.
The word folly can mean an error, but in architectural terms it also can mean delight, or a
favorite abode. A folly might be appreciated by the builder only or, perhaps, a visitor from the
Folly Fellowship whose “goal is to protect lonely and unloved buildings of little purpose from
being rationalized or destroyed” (“The Folly Fellowship: Aims”). I consider 310 Convention a
folly in that if one were to evaluate it solely in terms of fixed notions of historical value (e.g., the
renown of its architect or owner, its age, rarity, or architectural purity), it might be easy to tear
down. In my efforts to protect the house, I have relied on the folly to be found in methods such
as chora, a generative process of discovery that allows for a multiplicity of perspectives in doing
research and creative options in how that research is expressed in the spacing on the page.
Building on Derrida’s play with the word chora as a model for his spacing on the page,
Ulmer notes that “the choral word (event functioning as abstraction) sets a series going, a
movement or passage through language, a spreading memory, drawing to itself an associated
range of meanings. The choral word produces the paradigm, the combinatorial of possibilities,
from which the inventor selects” (227). My investigation of 310 Convention is full of such
indeterminate pleasures. The house “called” to me when, in the Poetics of Place seminar, Dr.
Richardson encouraged us to research a place of the past that held personal interest for us.
Three-ten Convention popped to mind and, since that light bulb eureka moment, I have allowed
chains of significance to unfold without (and certainly with) determined force in my approach to
research. Ulmer identifies the process as “punceptual” and differentiates between it and more
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evident so-called linear connections we might make. He writes, “[t]he pun is one of the most
basic linguistic units for creating redundancies, the condition that gives rise in experience to a
feeling of eureka. . . . Thus the formal point at which the Heuretic code may be grafted onto the
Hermeneutic code is located in the mystory’s reliance on the pun as part of its invention” (228;
emphasis in original). A most surprising puncept was the chain of definitions and derivations of
the name “Barbe” I discovered on my “day off” from reading theory. The discovery resulted in a
refreshed understanding of my relationship to Barbe, the house, and the emerging document in
ways I would not have considered otherwise. In a sense, I learned to think other-wise.
The folly of punceptual knowledge and invention has influenced how I apply Martin
Heidegger’s concepts of building and dwelling, sparing and preserving, as fundamental states of
being. Not all dwelling-beings require folly. One can spare and preserve without the feeling of
delight, perhaps solely out of duty or necessity. In the case of 310 Convention and, perhaps,
similar houses and projects, folly is imperative because of the insignificant status and
perspectives attributed to the house through hermeneutic approaches. The choral play of
heuretics releases the signifying potential of the subject, encouraging others to interact with and
build significance too; to dwell in the potential of the subject. Through folly, the dwelling-being
of 310 Convention is transformed into a fictive real site where the subjunctive “what if?”
interacts with the indicative “what is” to imagine possibilities for how human beings make and
perform space in life and on the page.
Whatever the pleasure, the folly of less determined processes requires the researcher to
attend to her rights and responsibilities regarding the subject(s). This point is illustrated by the
trope that guided my interaction with the Sanborn Maps in Chapter Three. Chancing upon
Pastorius’ model of the archive as hive, I learned through subsequent research that honey bees
gather nectar so as to create the structure and sustenance, the wax comb and honey, of the hive.
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Further, their actions are directed toward the greater good of the colony and, through pollination,
they give back to the plants from which they gather the nectar. The archiving bees taught me to
consider not only how my interaction with the maps might benefit me and my academic
community, but how it might acknowledge those people and communities embedded in the
maps, those who made them and those who lived and worked in the structures represented there.
In Chapter Three, my process of collecting and composing, dwelling in and building from
the Sanborn Maps implied how I might give back to the archives that sustained me. The digital
and hard bound maps required me to engage them in different ways, acknowledging what was
included and left out of each archive, and what I chose to focus on and ignore. Generally, the
metonymic partiality of the maps resulted in gaps where I discovered elements that exceeded the
economy of the structure. While efficient, the shorthand labels for buildings gave way to the
promise and drawbacks of change – “D”-welling becoming FILL’G STA becoming PARK’G
LOT – as people fled to “better” neighborhoods leaving the downtown district desolate of places
we might love and call home. The excesses of historicity, of bodies imprinted by and imprinting
history, were evident also in the labor and craft required to compose and update the hard bound
maps. Similarly, the digital maps invited me to follow a chain of discrete moments in time and
space in order to grasp a partial sense of the historicity embedded there. My joyous play with the
digital graphics was interrupted by my realization that the places I reproduced and shifted about
so easily were once inhabited by people for whom the shifts – from theatre to undertaker’s to
barber’s to baker’s – were not so easy. In other words, I learned that my representations in word
and image were bound by the same conventions of metonymic economy and excess displayed in
the archives I drew on to make them.
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In building this document, I have had to consider the implications of how my collection
and composition performs. What I build on the page is not the house, its miniature model, or my
performance installations. Rather, it reflects the multiple chronotopes (figures of bodies in space
and time) I have discovered and bring to bear upon what I have collected and transformed. The
written result of this accrual is not indicative of sterile reproduction although it does reflect, even
imitate at times, the iterations layered within its form. I do not write, as Peggy Phelan suggests I
should, “towards disappearance” (165). Instead, I perform the act of bricolage aiming to
represent and present the multiple temporalities that accumulate in bodies, their memories, the
things they make and do in order to express themselves to others. I understand and appreciate
Phelan’s position against a politics of visibility, in which “institutions whose only function is to
preserve and honor objects – traditional museums, archives, banks, and to some degree,
universities – are intimately involved in the reproduction of the sterilizing binaries of self/other,
possession/dispossession, men/women which are increasingly inadequate formulas for
representation” (165). However, I do not believe the response to the inadequacies lies in
favoring a present-ist bias as Phelan does in her claim that “performance’s only life is in the
present,” and that the only way to document such events is through “the act of writing toward
disappearance, rather than . . . writing toward preservation” (146, 148).
In staking out her position for the ontology of performance as one of disappearance,
Phelan writes:
Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies. In performance art
spectatorship there is an element of consumption: there are no leftovers, the gazing
spectator must try to take everything in. Without a copy, live performance plunges into
visibility – in a maniacally charged present – and disappears into memory, into the realm
of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control. Performance
resists the balanced circulations of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends. (148)
136
Phelan’s claim that the defining feature of performance is an all consuming presence that “saves
nothing” seems to me to miss the mark especially as regards the living bodies that are so central
to her claim. Bodies are not tabulae rasae that enter a performance unmarked by their prior
experiences. Performers and spectators alike enter into a performance carrying their assorted
baggage, always packed a little differently, with them. Their histories and herstories, sensory
and cognitive, visual and verbal and print informed memories affect how each interacts with the
event and what they take away with them. In Across Disciplines, for example, my experience of
Barbara Faulkner’s project concerning the defunct movie theatre was influenced as much by my
memories of attending the theatre in the past as by the remnants she displayed and the activity
she designed for the audience to do. My memory bits affected my experience and how I think
about it now. Images of the movie Brazil, a new found friend eating popcorn at my side,
regulate and are regulated by my recall of Barbara’s piece, each bit activating and sustaining the
other and, like Barbara’s piece, paying tribute to the power of the imagination to preserve the
past in generative, exciting ways. Barbara’s performance saves. Different perceptual baggage
influenced how I experienced Gretchen’s piece performed for the benefit at the Shaw Center.
For me, her research concerning the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum was ciphered through
the reasons we had gathered. A desire for stability, not unlike that of a curator faced with a
collection of remnants she loves, showed itself liable to the forces of history, whether
institutional, discursive, or physical. Gretchen’s performance saves this desire and liability,
helping me at the time and as I write now to make some sense of the manically charged present,
which would just as soon such sense-making disappear; that I dump my political baggage and go
unconscious. The noted examples demonstrate my view of how we and the things we make and
do function metonymically. Through the partialities we restore, performance is already
embedded in loss.
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To write of performance requires that we recognize the past that is always already a part
of the performance event. The bodies that participate in a performance are marked by the
diverse and divergent pasts they carry with/in them. Restored in the act of performance, these
remnants operate as metonyms, recurved in the bricolage of multiple temporalities that constitute
the event. The accumulations and restorations add to the web of relations that emerge in a given
performance as the participants make associations from what they bring, gather, and piece
together individually and collectively. The recognition and use of metonymy and bricolage in
performance and performance writing demonstrates what can be gained from the accumulation
of partialities. As Derrida reminds us, binaries like absence and presence are superseded by play,
by how we choose to play, and while playing in recognition of multiple temporalities exposes us
to leftovers, copies, regulations, and controls, it also increases the potential of the web of
relations we construct.
The significance of the issues I addressed above became apparent to me through my use
of the mystory, which allows me to engage the house and my research on multiple levels. The
multiplicity helps me unfix the attributions of historic or commercial value that might deem the
house insignificant. As processed and written, the research re-imagines in-significance showing
how multiple subjectivities and perspectives are at work in the term as applied to the house and,
as such, it cannot be erased easily even if it is physically destroyed.
One in-significant issue that emerged from the mystory process concerns what it means
to write and perform from multiple and shifting perspectives where the power of will is not
denied as much as tempered by a curiosity regarding the other forces at play. As with Richard
Schechner’s notion that performance is restored behavior, the mystory understands it is
embedded with memories and histories that it restores deliberately and not so deliberately
through enactment, thereby activating a confluence of networks and forces that extend beyond
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itself. For instance, my miniature model of 310 Convention restores with deliberate care the
yellow color used to designate it as a wooden structure in the Sanborn Maps, which by sheer
coincidence also restores the current color of the actual house repainted to meet cosmetic
standards of urban renewal (Barbe perusing paint samples at Lowe’s); and while the shape of the
model restores, again with deliberate care, the architectural details I drew from my photos, field
research, and the Sanborn Maps, it also restores what I failed to learn, the model papered with
the dead end letters that spurned my efforts (Barbe perusing paint samples at Lowe’s); and while
the house as modeled gained in-significance by means of the two installations – a mise en abyme
miniature and a metonym of loss – a few blocks away sat the actual house “abandoned and
isolated” I write always cognizant of its resistant force to anything I or anyone else might create
or say about it.
Remember the chain link fence I mentioned in Chapter Five, the cautionary “keep out”
that surrounded 310 after its renovations? Well, the fence is gone, replaced (sometime between
Chapters Five and Six) by a gleaming black, wrought iron fence of impressive height: Spanish
inspired New Orleans meets Impure Victoriana in downtown Baton Rouge, Dr. Fridge on the
porch and Barbe perusing paint samples at Lowe’s, big bold black stripes against a bright yellow
bulk. It looks like a bee.
The mystory process also propels the in-significance of local knowledge, history,
memory, and culture. By insisting that the researcher engage diverse domains of discourse, the
mystory levels the playing field to start, encouraging the researcher to discover rather than
assume the relationship between the discourses at play. In this way, a researcher learns to view
the world in terms of perspectives often subjugated in the academy due to the discourses it deems
significant as conditioned by nationalist and corporate agendas and patronage. However,
learning to view locally is not only about subverting or resisting subjugation by the powerful, the
139
once termed “dominant discourses” or “master narratives.” It also is about recalling and
learning from events held by and for locals where subjugation, as discussed here, is the last thing
on people’s minds. For instance, in south Louisiana, crawfish boils are events typically staged
in someone’s backyard for a small group of family and friends. If someone were to ask the
group, the significance of the crawfish boil to national or global cuisines, the group might smile
politely and, then, turn back to decapitate some more crawfish – finding the question slightly
irrelevant (and just a little bit stupid) in the current context. However, if the same person asked
the group the ingredients of the boil, attention would be paid since recipes are prized and often
discussed at boils. Similarly, while I made significance of the benefit for displaced artists – i.e.,
what does the event tell us about performance and culture if we could care less about the
aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita – for me and I believe those who participated in the
event, it was important precisely because it was held by and directly addressed the needs of the
local public. Put another way, the event could not have been staged elsewhere. It was insignificance
itself. From this view, and reinserting power structures, the entity of 310 might ask
the arbiters of historic value to explain the significance of its criteria: why should I care about the
purity of style or the renown of an architect or owner? Why should the provincial concerns of
your itty-bitty group matter to me? Of course, they do matter. My point, then, is not that power
structures should be ignored, or that we should favor isolationist attitudes, or that discourses
don’t cohabitate, or that someone at the crawfish boil couldn’t explain the significance of the boil
to national cuisine. Rather, my point is that in its most radical applications the mystory shows
the researcher turning the multi-facet of power so as to learn what it might mean to view and
practice power from another angle, otherwise insignificant.
My application of the mystory also influenced my relationship to philosophy. The
method encouraged me to experiment with how I might ground philosophical inquiry in
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performance and historicity, in the materiality of bodies in place and time imprinted by and
imprinting their histories. Derrida’s call for chora, or spacing on the page, became manifest in
the playful folly of derivatives related to Barbe and her ownership of the house, in the bricolage
photographs of 310, and in the visual models of pop up houses, which delight us not because
they close the gap between signified and signifier, but because they open it, displaying inventive
difference. Heidegger’s twin concepts of building and dwelling became increasingly important
to me as I applied the mystory method, placing divergent discourses in conversation with each
other and, in this case, finding they converse quite amiably. Building and dwelling ask to be
enacted in sensual, material ways so as to discover the experiential knowledge of what it means
to build a house and what it means to dwell, to situate the body in relation to a place it loves. As
transcendent states of mind, building-dwelling-loving bear up under the scrutiny of significance,
while as material practices – fingers gooey with paste, a glazier etching “J. R. Fridge, M.” over a
door as Fridge himself waits to see the “D.” appear, my love for the place expressed through my
fingers as I type this sentence – they bear less significance until one dwells in them, discovers
them through actual or imagined practice.
The mystory has taught me the in-significance of a study that functions figuratively, as
metaphor and metonym. In light of the latent power of metonymic forms, the study articulates
itself as loss, as a creative art of losing. Like performance, it seeks to recall and restore remnants
of the past through enactment and expression and, like many performance forms, it also seeks to
recognize what it cannot represent and to acknowledge its partiality and incompleteness. My
performance of loss helps me understand and express what loss means to me in light of
communities that suffer enormous loss across the world and here at home, and in light of the
losses of daily life: a dear pet, a forgotten lover, a misdeed, a button, a memory, a home. It is
141
my hope that by performing loss in creative ways I have told a story that in some way benefits
the in-significance of the other subject of my story.
In closing, I return to the house that compelled me to build and dwell in it by means of
research and this document. Even if I can attend to 310 only by means of this text, perhaps it
will eke out a space for the house in which it can survive. Underlying my desire is an ethics of
responsible stewardship toward the places in which we dwell, our homes, communities, and the
environment that sustains us. As Heidegger reminds us, the material and cultural spaces we
inhabit are worthy of preservation for no other reason than dwelling is a fundamental human
need:
On all sides we hear talk about the housing shortage, and with good reason. Nor is there
just talk; there is action too. We try to fill the need by providing houses, by promoting
the building of houses, planning the whole architectural enterprise. However hard and
bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of houses remains, the real plight of
dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling is indeed
older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase of the earth’s
population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real dwelling plight lies in
this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to
dwell. What if man’s homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of
the real plight of dwelling as the plight? Yet as soon as man gives thought to his
homelessness, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the
sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling.
But how else can mortals answer this summons than by trying on their part, on
their own, to bring dwelling to the fullness of its nature? This they accomplish when they
build out of dwelling, and think for the sake of dwelling. (158-159)
Heidegger’s ideas seem more imperative in light of the events of the past three years in south
Louisiana, the consequences of which are apparent in the number of homes that lie empty and
unrepaired; the parallel number of homeless who cannot find affordable housing; the continued
loss of the wetlands that if attended to would provide protection for those who remain. I hope
my investigation of the in-significance of 310 Convention extends beyond my own case of
topophilia into a fictive real space that inspires others not only to preserve places like this, but to
extend the idea of building toward and in terms of our collective dwelling on the earth.
142
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VITA
Lisa Flanagan was born November 19, 1967, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. While her
young parents, Judith and Robert, searched out their own education and purpose in life, she and
her siblings, Laura and Chris, were afforded the opportunity to grow up in many interesting
dwellings and spaces over the years. In June of 1986, she graduated from Newburyport High
School in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and subsequently entered Louisiana State University.
She continued the family nomadic tradition and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy
from The University of Texas at Austin in December of 1990. She followed graduation with
some life lessons in New Orleans that included the discovery of her husband, James, and the
birth of her first child, Devon. In January of 1996, after completing her education as a coffee
slinger and bookshelver at her friends’ bookstore she entered the master’s program in
communication studies at Louisiana State University, with a focus in performance studies. To
date, she has participated in numerous productions as performer and director in the HopKins
Black Box Theater, which she currently manage; taught almost every class the department has to
offer at the 1000 and 2000 levels; and even communicated across curriculums during her tenure
at LSU. It has been a long ride, earning her Master of Arts in August 2002 (after having another
son, Liam, in the middle of thesis work) and then continuing on towards a soon to be conferred
doctorate. Future goals include performing, directing, teaching, writing, spending time with her
family, and a house near the ocean.