In my discussion I introduced the issue of viewing the exhibition of portraiture in the particular space of the Pulitzer. This topic involved one of the primary themes of the exhibit—“embodiment”—but went beyond the issue of how the subjects of the portraits were embodied in the object, or how our experience of works were mediated by phenomenological conditions of scale, distance, and corporeal relationship to specific objects, but rather how our experience with objects, and the exhibition as a whole, was conditioned, mediated, or perhaps even determined by Tadao Ando’s gallery and what I see as the aestheticized nature of the building.

This was a difficult issue to introduce since it is grounded, of course, in a subjective experience. However, the questions I wanted to raise were these: how, exactly, were our experiences of and relationships to works mediated by the aesthetic environment and how did this affect our readings of works, and to what degree did the space condition or determine the quality and nature of the exhibit? That is, was there a way in which we can see the space as somehow “trumping” the experience of the exhibit, in a sense controlling how we both negotiate the works and how the exhibit and objects were arranged? And to what degree does this modify the educational strategies of the exhibit as pronounced in the catalogue and other statements? To my mind the Pulitzer building is an exceptional and stimulating example of a modernist gallery. Made largely of bare concrete, stripped of ornament, structured with right angles, and composed around a grand, light-filled (and apse-like) main gallery, the space presents itself as a rarified environment, one meant to be aesthetically and perhaps spiritually transcendent from the everyday. One of the questions at the heart of my discussion, then, was how does this aesthetic experience condition, or maybe even preclude, our psychological connection with both the objects and their human subjects? How does it transform the functions of the portraits, and the exhibit as a whole? Does this create an alienating distance—in psychological and emotional terms—between us and the subjects of the portraits, or does it create a necessary condition of detached contemplation for the objects? Although the responses to this discussion were varied, introducing this concept seemed to relate to a common theme of the symposium as to how the qualities, characteristics, and identity of a person or group of people can be (or not) adequately conveyed through material signs. These questions, then, broadened this context into thinking about the environmental conditions in which these signs are absorbed.