The Vienna Secession and Adolf Loos : Ornament and Sexuality in Fin-de-siècle Vienna

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  • ウィーン分離派とアドルフ・ロース --世紀末ウィーンにおける装飾とセクシュアリテイ--
  • ウィーン分離派とアドルフ・ロース : 世紀末ウィーンにおける装飾とセクシュアリティ
  • ウィーン ブンリハ ト アドルフ ・ ロース : セイキマツ ウィーン ニ オケル ソウショク ト セクシュアリティ

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The aim of this paper is to investigate why ornament could become the main theme in the art in Fin-de-siècle Vienna from the viewpoint of sexuality. Leading the trend of ornamental arts and crafts in Austria was the Vienna Secession, the association of young artists headed by Gustav Klimt. On the other hand, the architect A dolf Loos advocated against any ornament and practiced it in his architecture. These two poles boosted up ornament as a controversial subject. However, the relationship between the Secession and Loos is no simple than to make a confrontational schematic view. This paper will reveal that the seemingly conflicting two champions had rather implicitly constructed a cooperative relationship each other. They both considered ornament to be sublimation of erotic desires, and ornament won a place as a kind of fetish. I analyze and compare the logic of discourses about ornament of the Secession and Loos from the standpoint of fetishism. In the contemporary context, ornament was understood as the substitute of sexual desires and non-ornament as the denial of them ; however, as far as a fetish signifies the displacement of desires, the absence of ornament itself could become a fetish too. Therefore, the suppression of ornament, forbidding the exposure of sexual desires, holds possibility to be perverted to the promoter of eroticism. In that sense, both the fondness and the antipathy toward ornament are orientated to the erotic. However, comparing the practices of Adolf Loos with that of Gustav Klimt, it is hard to say that they both treated ornament as the satisfier of erotic desires. In Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and Loos's Josephine Baker House, ornament functions as a "mask" to deceive men's eyes and protect them from the danger of women. Ornamentation is a mask which a man obsessed with sexuality needs when he faces off against the erotic.

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