The Architect & The Housewife
Frances Stark (1999)
Frances Stark’s The Architect & The Housewife unfolds as a sequence of interrelated texts that consider − amongst many other things − the varying roles that gender acts out in contemporary art practice. Stark’s wry, humane and often playful text, examines the inherent tensions − both emotional and social − that operate at the juncture where the private and the public meet.
The text, which opens innocuously enough, as a gentle riff on domesticity soon unfolds to reveal a promiscuous tangle of associations. The Architect & The Housewife indexes a bewildering, seemingly infinite range of cultural references, that includes: Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist, Danish ‘Modern’ furniture, domesticity, the studio, loneliness, consumerism, Ikea, the family, friendships, the spectacle, modernism, the avant-garde, Romanticism, architecture, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, home economics, public art, Daniel Buren, marriage, tattoos, R. M. Schindler, E.H. Gombrich and − perhaps most significantly − scatter cushions.
Out of print.
