Architects had tried to revive
ornamentalism once before, in the 1980s, with postmodernism.
Her chapters are neo-feudal
ornamentalism and elitist fantasies; producing cosmopolitanism, hierarchy, and social cohesion; design genius and his ghost others; charitable non-love and philanthro-capitalism; insubordinations of the laughing craftswomen; erotic capital and benevolence of the vampish goddesses; and fashion, whisky, and "muscular" neo-royals.
I take this slippage in Francis's archive as an invitation to read the "Natives from Jerusalem" otherwise, by attempting to provide some depth into its otherwise flattened
ornamentalism.
The festive appearance of churches decorated with polychrome ornament and gilded onion domes (which may have originated as late as the 16th century) represents for many the essence of the Russian style in architecture and design, but
ornamentalism is only one part of the national genius in architecture.
But they went out of fashion also because the tides of esthetic fashion, in flowing outward from the classical taste of previous centuries, persuaded too many people that form follows function, and
ornamentalism is sentimentalism.
As the geographical reference in its title suggests, Tropic of Cancer's tropical language of vivid colors and primal encounters happens in the mythical spaces of Empire; the name of the novel itself is an attempt to key the reader into a kind of primitivism and linguistic
ornamentalism that, in the years leading up to World War One, had become an almost standardized way of representing desire and a rebellion from "civilization.
31) However, even among those not taken in by fake fakirs and shonky spiritualists, or attracted to sensuality and
ornamentalism, the East remained a source of fascination and wonder.
In Gusti's view, the implied policing of the design process to weed out deviations (19)--mimicry of national forms, gratuitous
ornamentalism, the fetishist overemphasis of technique--in no way impinged on the "enthusiastic development of architectural expression .
Tracing the social life of things and offering new readings of both canonical and less well-known literary accounts of objects,
Ornamentalism usefully explores the production and circulation of accessories and their textual representations.
Yet the most compelling moments are often those in which Ganguly gives some sense of the cinematic or even artistic contexts for Ray's experiments, as she does in explaining how Ray, by means of the contrast between 'The heavy
ornamentalism of Devi's mise-en-scene' and 'later shots of the denuded countryside', exposes 'the useless expenditure and sensationalism of mainstream Indian cinema,' and thereby attempts 'to defamiliarize audiences and to distance them from their mental images of Hindu deities derived from popular films' (pp124-25).
