Word: riley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lecturer speaking in the Tapestry Room at the Gardner Museum has Isabella Gardner to thank for endowing the place with a magical feeling that tickles audience's souls and subdues their critical faculties. Had Terence Riley, chief curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at Museum of Modern Art in New York, stood at the podium and screamed out math equations-in German-he probably still would have been a crowd pleaser...
...Riley, however, did not exploit his audience's silly bliss, but instead presented a good-natured and pleasant lecture on the primary and secondary uses of architecture at the Gardner. He used various slides of Gardner's objects in order to take the audience on a "stroll" through the collection. Riley's lecture, itself meandering back and forth through ideas, allowed us in weave in and out of the museum's rooms...
Beginning the lecture by declaring himself a Derridean "amateur" at art history, Riley used the collection as tool in order to elucidate some interesting issues in theories of architecture. Although at times his analyses of the works seemed a little farfetched. he did present some intriguing questions about the role of architecture...
...Although Riley insisted that the museum worked as architectural and decorative whole, he never attempted to explain how. However, he did characterize the integration of art and architecture by astutely explaining that the "architecture is binding" and that it "leaks in and out of the art." In his discussion of the architecture a s subject in art, he suggested that architecture adds weightness or gravitas to a science and demonstrated this by claiming that furniture and architectural fragments in Botticell's "Mother and Child Jesus" made the scene less domestic and more dignified. Perhaps more convincing was his point that...
...Riley also addressed the issue of frames, and did so by returning to his aesthetic/utilitarian dualism. He provided contrasting examples of frames used to project paintings and those used to adorn and enhance them. He emphasized that upon close scrutiny it is evident that some frames are decorated by architectural motifs like columns pediments, and arches thereby aesthetically representing their utilitarian role; some like Vasari's "The Musicians," act as a window through which the protagonists lean...