Art, land, and the gendering of Parnassus
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Donald Preziosi
Abstract
Is a landscape (whether “sacred” or not) gendered? Do artifacts — or for that matter built environments as such — mark, gender or even “queer” a landscape? Are there “male,” “female,” or gender-ambivalent forms or spaces? This article reflects on the evidence for the gradual transformation, over several centuries and culminating in the classical period of art and architecture, of the ancient sanctuary of Delphi from being a site devoted primarily to female powers and divinities to one in which the former were occluded, marginalized, or erased by the cult of the (apparently) male deity Apollo. This process was reflected in temple sanctuaries throughout the Hellenic world prior to the replacement of both by sites and buildings devoted to Christian worship. Ancient Hellenic sanctuary spaces and forms were semiotically hybrid and unstable, their significance parallactic and ambiguously gendered.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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- A conceptual linkage between cognitive architectures and social interaction
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Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Signification and space
- Towards an anthropological theory of space and place
- Spatial reification, or, collectively embodied amnesia, aphasia, and apraxia
- Spatial representation, activity, and meaning: Children's images of the contemporary city
- The performance of secrecy: Domesticity and privacy in public spaces
- The choretic work of history
- Art, land, and the gendering of Parnassus
- The semiotics of the Vitruvian city
- Space complexity and architectural conception: Revisiting Alberti's treatise
- Meaning of space and architecture of place
- Ship as a space locus, architecture as a space fabrica
- Introduction: Organizational semiotics and social simulation
- A conceptual linkage between cognitive architectures and social interaction
- The semiotic actor: From signs to socially constructed meaning
- Information systems actability: Tracing the theoretical roots
- Norms-based simulation for personalized service provision
- Universities as producers of evolutionarily stable signs of excellence for academic labor markets?
