ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand historically what we care about when we pay attention to Francesca Woodman's art. Blueprint for a Temple was produced in the last year of Woodman's life, and she showed the complete work at the Alternative Museum in New York City that same year. The collage is massive, occupying a full wall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Blueprint for a Temple is made of blueprints: precisely, it is a diazo collage. Diazotype printing, familiar from the 1920's on as a way of reproducing architectural plans, can be used to make accurate large-format copies. The theme of the illegible is a mark of Woodman's immersion in the history of art. Woodman's later works mirror the terms of loss inherent in late twentieth-century shifts in aesthetics, and her images mobilize the terms of blindness and illegibility, of wound and of the capacity to wound.
