Interior/ity camouflage: superficial adaptations of bodies and architectures

Abstract

In Édouard Vuillard’s painting Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist (1893), the connection between interior architecture and one’s embodied interiority is brought, quite literally, to the surface. The wall is covered with a dense, dizzy wallpaper. Pressed against it, the painter’s sister, Marie, in a long, checkered dress. Uneasy, she melts into the wall: pattern to pattern, body to architecture. In this fin de siècle scene, Marie camouflages herself in the room. Provoked by this image and the emergence of the interior (Charles Rice 2007), this paper aims to triangulate the body with architecture (interiors), and subjectivity (interiority). While the need for bodily camouflage may be selfexplanatory in warfare or wilderness, in an interior it turns unexpected. The term, possibly from the Italian capo muffare for ‘muffling the head’ (Oxford English Dictionary), offers protection and interiority: the head being an identifying feature (a surface) and a stand-in for the self (a container). Borrowing from Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel, which plots iterative representations of embodied (e)motion, this paper-atlas will think with bodies that confuse themselves with architectural surfaces. It will incorporate contemporaries to Vuillard’s imagery (Sigmund Freud, Adolf Loos, Charlotte Perkins) and expand to bodily representations and interiors from newer periods and media (Heidi Bucher, Yayoi Kusama). By curating and clustering depictions of camouflaged bodies, this paper prods at the protective, reflective nature of architectural interiors and the decorative function of surfaces. Can they ever evidence a sort of intimate maladaptation, or even an actual threat? If an interior is one’s lair, when does it, paraphrasing Louise Bourgeois, shift from a refuge into a trap?