The Architect & the Housewife

Frances Stark's 'The Architect & The Housewife' unfolds as a sequence of interrelated texts that consider - amongst many other things - the varying roles that gender acts out in contemporary art practice. Stark's wry, humane and often playful text, examines the inherent tensions - both emotional and social - that operate at the juncture where the private and the public meet. The text, which opens innocuously enough, as a gentle riff on domesticity soon unfolds to reveal a promiscuous tangle of associations. 'The Architect & The Housewife' indexes a bewildering, seemingly infinite range of cultural references, that includes: Oscar Wilde's 'The Critic as Artist', Danish 'Modern' furniture, domesticity, the studio, loneliness, consumerism, Ikea, the family, friendships, the spectacle, modernism, the avant-garde, Romanticism, architecture, Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own', home economics, public art, Daniel Buren, marriage, tattoos, R. M. Schindler, E.H. Gombrich and - perhaps most significantly - scatter cushions.--Book Works website.