ABSTRACT
Woodman's paradoxical Blueprint for a Temple is the perfected classical sanctuary of the aesthetic, cool blue, remote, and antithetical to confession or diary; it mounts its aesthetic onto transience and the kind of disappearance that is not vanishing but is becoming illegible, hence risking its own readability. The substance, the material, of the work is potently allusive, signifying Woodman's invocation of architectural practice, connecting her photographic collage with the architectonic: by its medium the photographic collage Blueprint for a Temple claims its queer place in architectural practice. Woodman used the blueprint medium for other images, many of which have some architectural derivation, but none is quite as unmistakably architectonic as Blueprint for a Temple. Blueprint for a Temple argues for its entrance into the register of the architectonic even as it cannot stand up and perform as architecture, as built space. This sense of the collage being always unfinished, as much a ruin as a blueprint, haunts the piece.
