Instead, it belongs to what I call architecture's new
ornamentalism, a movement committed to visual play at the level of entire structures and whole facades, which appear to sway and swoop.
(16) Amanda Bailey, '"Bought my Boye": The Boy as Accessory on the Early Modern Stage', Bella Mirabella (ed.),
Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories (Ann Arbor, 2011), 310, http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mpub.2056317.
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. I follow the lead of Danika Medak-Saltzman, Nancy Parezo, and Don Fowler to provide names for those inhabitants where possible.
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." Brassai's photos from Paris in the early thirties show young women at le bal des Quat'z Arts dressing up in beads and grass skirts, baring their breasts like Josephine Baker in the Folies Bergeres performing the danse sauvage, and the pages of transition exhibited African and Oceanic skulls between the avant-garde art.
Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century there were occasional attempts to counter what one hard-headed rationalist described as "the romance clinging to all things oriental." (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.
See also Karen Raber, "Chains of Pearls: Gender, Property, Identity," in
Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories, ed.
Incidentally, Hussainmiya's article lends support to historian David Cannadine's argument about '
ornamentalism' being the ideological cement of the British empire.
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 ...