Julie Johnson: The Bird´s-Eye-View at Steinhof

Vortrag (in englischer Sprache)

Julie Johnson is working on a book-length study on the bird’s-eye view that incorporates the visual cultures of modernity and the traditions of the Imperial Baroque. The focus of her presentation is the concept of the bird’s-eye view as related to asylum planning. The Steinhof psychiatric hospital and complex, for example, is best read from a bird’s-eye view of the city of Vienna. It has grounds that are too large to comprehend without knowing the plans or seeing the golden dome of Wagner’s church from the Gloriette at Schönbrunn. Indeed, Steinhof’s central axis mirrors the axis of Schönbrunn. The administrative organization, too, depends upon a bird’s-eye view of the imagination, overseen by one head doctor, and a very complex bureaucracy reaching into the farthest pavilion, mimicking the Imperial oversight of the Monarchy and ist many crown lands. As if to underscore this motif, the theater that was built in the center of the Steinhof asylum complex has a painted bird’s-eye view of Vienna as seen from the complex as ist main decoration over the stage. Julie Johnson’s focus on the architecture and use of theaters in asylums in the Habsburg Empire provides a way of examining theories of space, perception and nervousness in the early twentieth century.

Julie Johnson, Dr., is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research focus is on gender issues and histories of display in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Her newest work on the history of theaters built for insane asylums led to the bird’s-eye view project. She is IFK_Research Fellow.
Recent publications include: Athena Goes to the Prater: Parodying Ancients and Moderns at the Vienna Secession, in: Oxford Art Journal, 26, 2, 2003, p. 47–70; Writing, Erasing, Silencing: Tina Blau and the (Woman) Artist’s Biography, in: Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 4, 3, Autumn 2005; Helene Funkes Stillleben: Ein Blick auf das Übersehene, in: Helene Funke (1869–1957), Linz 2007; Theater as Therapy at Mauer-Öhling: The Fin-de-Siècle Realization of a Romantic Dream?, in: Illness, Mad(wo)men and Crime: Myth, Metaphor and Reality in Austrian Arts and Sciences, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (forthcoming). She is also writing a book based on her dissertation, which won the Austrian Cultural Institute Prize. It is provisionally titled "The Memory Factory: Influence anxiety and gender in the art of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna".